When Hewlett-Packard doled out $10 billion for Autonomy late last year, the struggling company endured slings and arrows from competitor Oracle, along with cautious optimism from InfoWorld Editor in Chief Eric Knorr. Since then HP has seen former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch depart on less-than-amicable terms -- along with Autonomy's entire original management team and 20 percent of its staff. The $10 billion question is whether HP is going to see its big data play pay off or watch it turn into another WebOS-style debacle that demonstrates HP should just stick to hardware.
In a move that may temporarily silence HP's critics, the company's Autonomy wing today rolled out a series of cloud-based products, built around Autonomy IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer) 10, aimed at bringing new order and analysis to Hadoop (on which HP's Converged Cloud is based) and to Web clickstream data. The advances are intended to yield deeper visibility into reams of structured and unstructured data.
Autonomy's IDOL -- which combines with Vertica, HP's acquired data warehouse software -- can now be embedded in Hadoop nodes. From there, users can combine Idol's 500-plus functions -- including automatic categorization, clustering, and hyperlinking -- to scour various sources of structured and unstructured data to glean deeper meanings and trends. Sources run the gamut, too, from structured data such as purchase history, services issues, and inventory records to unstructured Twitter streams, and even audio files. IDOL includes 400 connectors, which companies can use to get at external data.
Among the benefits to this approach, according to Matt Malden, a vice president at Autonomy, is that IDOL can do in-place analysis of data on Hadoop data storage, rather than having to copy data from one place to another to analyze it.
Autonomy also announced an extension to its digital market platform called Autonomy Optimost Clickstream Analytics, designed to provide marketers with a single view of visits, conversions, and customer engagement. Optimost Analytics lets marketers access granular clickstream data, which they can then analyze as they choose, according to Autonomy. Users can blend their data with unstructured information and third-party data for even deeper insights into customer interests and buying patterns.
According to Malden, the trick behind Optimost Analytics is giving average users tools to slice and dice data to discovered useful nuggets of information. The system has its own UI, but it can also use third-party visualization technology such as QlikView or Tableau.
This story, "HP extends Autonomy's big data chops to Hadoop cloud," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.