Autonomy Reviews

Former Employee – worked at Autonomy full-time

Pros – Autonomy's IDOL technology and the products they built around it are really competitive, specifically around the E-Discovery and Information Managment Solutions. Their marketing had always been very good, fantastic material, good demos, etc. Also the support from the Pre-Sales department has been exceptionally strong.

Cons – The corporate culture had been the worst I every experienced. People were purely looked at from a numbers perspective, senior management would never listen to anything they were told from somebody who was not part of their "club" (i.e. at least Cambridge based). Senior managers would regularly shout at employess, call them names, etc. - absolute nightmare

Advice to Senior Management – thankfully the senior management has completely left since the acquisition by HP. The new management should clearly pay more respect to their employees. Also the "international" approach has been purely around the UK and the USA. Any other part of the business (regionally) was overlooked. Management should pay a lot more attention to other regions, since there is untapped potential.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Autonomy full-time

Pros – good free lunch on Fridays.
The product is well marketed and when it works can be a game changer.
Great people at the worker level.
great location in san francisco.

Cons – *High attrition. The ones who saw the disaster coming left and the others who chose to stay are struggling to transition with little to no support through internal channels.
*Low morale due to management ruling through fear and intimidation. HP executives unresponsive while all the talented Autonomy senior management is gone. One can only dread who is left to run the ship.
*Resources and tools are either scattered and/or broken. Company does not eat it's own dog food. There is no loss of ironic laughter when hearing your co-workers complain about the need for "a better search solution".
*CRM system is broken and it will make your work a nightmare if you're on the sales side of the company.
*No structured training offered. Meetings that were labeled as training turned out to be just marketing updates with little to no practical use for those in attendance.
*no standardized organizational charting. You'll either have to keep asking everyone you see or roll the dice with the employee address book which provides no insight towards roles and responsibilities.
*The company will seek every possible reason to either delay or deny paying commissions to it's sales people no matter how much they meet or exceed beyond their quotas. I have personally seen and experienced the agonizing frustration of dealing with management when the subject of overdue commissions are brought up.
*work is not merit based. The amount of political savvy you will need to be successful here would qualify you for a seat in congress.
The list goes on........

Advice to Senior Management – Perform a role/performance audit on the legacy Autonomy executives which have seen their departmental staff leave in droves. The ship is being abandoned and it's not because of HP.
Pay your sales people when they bring in business.
Engage the message boards and address employee issues positively or see more people leave. How can having such a high turnover of staff be good for any business?

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Autonomy full-time for more than a year

Pros – Fantastic potential for technology, providing it really works
Many very good people at the worker level
Much of the technology is very cool, demos well, can solve real world issues, and gets very good reports from analysts

Cons – Corporate culture is 100 times worse than the worst company you have ever worked for - a former employee called it "Toxic"
Management doesn't care about employees or customers. Only cares about making sales this quarter.
Sales can't be made as either pricing is crazy high or sales cyle takes too long and management forces AE to focus only on more immediate prospects
No concept of creating partnership with customers
Customer support is a total joke. Took 20 calls from me to other AU folks to get one customer's basic support questions answered - no one wanted to own the problem
No idea who does what - org chart can't be found, so only way to get things done is to use your relationships, make tons of calls and hope someone calls back. Don't waste time on email, no one responds - total waste of time and resources
Management lies and instills fear as way of motivating. Most employees simply wait for the day they are fired or laid off. No concept of doing a good job and getting rewarded.
No performance review in over year and a half - spoke to manager once in last three months of employment - no direction given, just criticism - all problems were the employee's to fix and own.
Training was a joke - total drinking from fire hose only about how to do demos and some info about product. Absolutely no information about effective sales tactics to sell specific products
Product line is way too massive - company sells everything from scanning to speech to text to business process management to call center apps to ediscovery to archiving to records management to search. I mean, how does that assortment of technology make sense?

Advice to Senior Management – 1) Most of the senior management that was there before acquisiiton need to leave. Kudos to Meg for getting rid of Lynch and some of his cronies but his style had been accepted by most every other manager, so to change the culture, needs to start from the top.
2) Focus on what technology really works and pare down the breadth of the technology offerings.
3) Incent people to change the culture to one that values employees and customers. Meg has said the right things at HP meetings but nothing ever changed at Autonomy.
4) Create a more transparent management structure and tell people who does what, so problems and questions can get resolved quickly
5) Create a training program that highlights how to effectively sell this technology. While the stuff is cool, it is very difficult to sell for most people but some are successful - share the wealth and don't force everybody to figure it on their own
6) Use the HP concept of AGM so there aren't 50 sales people all calling on the same customer competing with each other and incentive everyone to help the rest of the team on an account rather than back stabbing and lying.
7) Get managers than truly care about people and want to help grow them and train them. Good guys finished last at Autonomy - some of the best people I worked with got fired as they tried to do the right thing - this is critical to fix
8) Autonomy is way too sales focused and way to focused on current quarter - find a way to support the sales guy that sees the value in deals that take more than a quarter or two to close. If the deal is real, these can be quite lucrative and can be very strategic for the future of the company.
9) Encourage employees to speak out and challenge the status quo. Employees have been treated like mushrooms in the past - this is one of the biggest reasons that Autonomy has the highest turnover rate of any company I have ever seen.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Autonomy full-time for less than a year

Pros – HP were able to break-up the kangaroo court that ran the company

Cons – Products only ever worked with considerable pro services.
Management tried to rule through intimidation.
Questionable ethics on contract negotiations.
Lots of forgotten promises.
Very few pre and post sales engineers.
A cut and run mentality on closing deals.

Advice to Senior Management – My advice to HP is to remove any senior sales management who have been in their roles for more than 3 years.
Get a decent CRM tool.
Get a price list that reps can quote from.
Get a proper pro services organization.
Question why you paid $10bn+ for such a sham of a company

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Autonomy full-time for more than a year

Pros – Good salary
Some very nice people
Good Christmas parties

Cons – Old school aggressive sales flogging tired tech that gets buggier and less stable with every release. There's no righting this ship Mr Youngjohns, give it up.

Advice to Senior Management – Hold your hands up and admit you're out your depth managing technical projects.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Autonomy

Pros – great people. good environment. decent management

Cons – If you work hard you'd expect at least a raise at a normal company. not here

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Autonomy full-time for more than a year

Pros – Some great technology and a few decent people have hung on and are to be commended for their perserverance. HP, if it sees it through, will create better possibilities but it will be a while to figure out how to do this - I wish them luck.

Cons – Absolutely the worst possible management culture imaginable; from top (mostly gone - and rightully so as the news will bear out) to bottom. Managers are used to lying to employees to get deals done with favored reps. Salesfolk hired for their rolodexes - once this is exhausted and they figure out they are selling questionable products/support and are jeopardizing their relationships and integrity (about 3-6 months in), they quit. Extremely caustic treatment and outright boldface lying to the very people who interface with the customer so customer satisfaction low and reputation shot. HP stuck trying to unwind this nettle of lies which is a shame because the people who represented some very fine products deserved better - but that wasn't the goal of Mike Lynch and company, was it?

Advice to Senior Management – Replace all levels of legacy Autonomy management and issue a public statement to existing customers that you will be in touch to introduce the HP way of doing of doing business; the customer-centric way. All should be removed to rid the culture of the toxic treatment of the customers and employees.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Autonomy full-time for less than a year

Pros – Very young and dynamic team.

Cons – The management could be improve.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Autonomy full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – The marketing is top-notch. It basically sells itself.

Cons – Too many to list. It was a sinking ship even before HP came along, now it's just hit an Iceberg and shattered in pieces!

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Autonomy full-time for more than a year

Pros – Autonomy does have some outstanding software products that are good and provide value when they are installed and configured correctly.....

Very nice co-workers that will try to help you

Cons – *Senior leadership does not care about the satisfaction of their customers.
*They acquire companies, integrate their IDOL technology, significantly reduce the development and support staff, but increase the sales force too large and very few sales people make any good money.
*Terrible customer support
* Sales leadership regularly in group meetings unprofessionally tears sales reps apart verbally.... a real team moral killer.
* The fastest revolving door of good sales people that I have ever witnessed.
* Sales leadership is very direct and aggressive about driving the sales teams to just close the business, take the money and run, whether the customer will benefit from the software or not.
* Many unhappy customers who admit that after they purchased the software they felt abandoned.
*Senior leadership only focused on selling the business to cash out which they did to HP who I believe will regret their decision

Advice to Senior Management – HP management needs to completely clean house of all senior leadership and completely clean house of all sales leadership and sales managers. They all need to go as soon as possible.

The market for their products does not support the size of their current sales staff headcount which needs to be reduced by at least 50% to allow those that remain to make a living.

Reinvest in technical support teams to improve customer satisfaction

Reinvest in product development to update some of the products which are getting rather old in the tooth from a technology perspective.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company