HP and Device IDOL 2012

December 1, 2011

When Hewlett-Packard (HP) purchased Autonomy this past August for $10.3 billion, nearly 24 times the small Cambridge-based software company’s earnings, it vowed it’s reasoning was to integrate Autonomy’s software with HP’s hardware products.

Three months later, ZD Net UK reported on November 29, 2011, Autonomy’s advanced data search, analysis and augmented reality technology will be integrated across HP’s products, in the article “Autonomy Plots HP- Spanning Tech”.

Autonomy’s chief executive, Mike Lynch said:

There is a lot of work going on between the different business units at HP [to integrate Autonomy technology]. Servers and storage is obviously key [but with the] Personal Systems Group stuff is going to come that was only available for very large companies.There’s also some really stunning technology for printing being done by both HP research and development people and Autonomy’s. More detail will be given very shortly.

Autonomy’s technology helps make sense of information generated by social media, phone calls, video feeds and other types of unstructured data. I am very interested to see what this technology brings to HP’s products over the next year.

I think it was in the late 1990oks I saw a demonstration of a smart photocopier in Japan. I am tempted to say it was a Fuji Xerox project, but I could be mistaken. The idea was that a photocopier would convert a scanned image to ASCII, perform optical character recognition, and then match the text to be copied against a database of information. The idea was that if the document contained information of a sensitive nature, the photocopier would make sure the user had the access level appropriate to the content. If not, the copier would not out the duplicate, note the instance, and notify via an alert a security function.

There are other applications of smart search and content processing applications which I have either seen as demonstrations or read about in the missives AtomicPR type firms carpet bomb me. Several observations:

The idea of smarter enterprise devices is a good one. There is no lack of effort in this area. However, moving beyond specialist markets remains a challenge. I anticipate that Hewlett Packard will have the confidence, experience, and resources to over come such hurdles.
The value added processing adds cycles to what some users view as a slow process. If the copier takes more time to determine if my copy is okay, I would probably find another solution. In business processes, snappy performance is highly desirable.
In security applications, the job of keeping access control lists and databases of potentially sensitive information in sync remains a work in progress. On the surface, the task seems trivial, but there is the existence of code words, the need for disambiguation, and the statistical rounding that can contribute to false positives.

The idea is a bold one, and it is sweeping through a range of news postings this morning. The buzz words attached include augmented reality, next generation,and HP spanning technology. The entire unfolding of this vision is something to which I am looking forward. I will enjoy the observations of the “real” experts in search as well. In the meantime, we have a new edition of IDOL to watch in the coming marketing season. I can hear the announcer now, “This is HP IDOL.”

Stephen E Arnold, December 1, 2011

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.