HP Marries Vertica and Autonomy
On November 29, HP unveiled a slew of new offerings to its Instant-On Enterprise portfolio, including the HP Next Generation Information platform dubbed IDOL 10, which combines software that it gained in its recent acquisition of speech and data analytics vendor Autonomy and Vertica, the company's analytics engine.
The new solutions were introduced at an HP conference in Vienna. They are aimed at helping companies analyze information from disparate sources, such as video, audio, email, texts, and social media, by identifying ideas and patterns in real time. Such "human information," as the company calls it, accounts for 85 percent of the world's data, according to the company's research.
HP IDOL 10 integrates an information-processing layer from Autonomy with a real-time analytics engine from Vertica. The combination lets organizations analyze all unstructured, semistructured, and structured information in a consistent, uniform way, according to HP.
HP is betting that the new products will bridge information gaps in garnering data in the CRM market.
"The next big opportunity for competitive advantage in the call center is to combine unstructured audio data with structured data on customers that resides in more traditional database formats, so organizations can deliver a more positive overall customer experience," Nicole Eagan, chief marketing officer at Autonomy, says.
"This opens up opportunities to not only improve customer satisfaction, but also drive revenue growth. The unified interface could be handy for synthesizing in a single workflow both structured and unstructured data, which are typically dealt with by separate systems within an enterprise," Eagan says.
The company also introduced HP Autonomy Appliances, which are powered by IDOL 10. Companies can use the appliances to conduct simplified archiving, eDiscovery, and enterprise search by extracting metadata from all data types and sources.
"Autonomy allows businesses to look at 100 percent of any problems—understanding sentiment and opinions that come across in phone conversations, as well as customer preferences and patterns that are reflected in transactional databases, in real time," Eagan explains.
The new offerings follow the Autonomy Explore product, also powered by IDOL, which enables businesses to analyze recorded contact center calls and link call center activity to the prospect's visit to the Web site, interactions with social media sites, or even notes from a storefront representative. Autonomy Explore provides recorded contact center interactions through sentiment analysis, spoken language identification, related concepts, and real-time analytics.
"Autonomy has a strong position in the $20 billion enterprise information management space, which is growing at eight percent annually and is uniquely positioned to continue growth within this space," HP said at the time of the acquisition. "Key Autonomy assets would provide HP with the ability to reinvent the $55 billion business analytics software and services space, which is growing at eight percent annually."
Privately held Vertica, a provider of next-generation analytics platforms, was acquired by HP in February 2011 for an undisclosed sum. The company boasted 300 customers, including Groupon, Twitter, Verizon, AOL, BlueCross/ BlueShield, AdMeld, Sunoco, Mozilla, and Comcast.