Autonomy Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Autonomy full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – If you had talent, drive and an ability to adapt you could do well at Autonomy.

Cons – Salary, employee relations and career development for young people were quite bad.

Advice to Senior Management – They got fired or left after the HP acquisition in which they all probably made millions. What can you tell people enjoying millions of dollars aquired as a direct result of their mgmt practices?

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

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

Pros – - They hire college grads with potential
- Great people in the office. Really feel like you're in the trenches together.
- Smart people: you will learn a lot
- Great office with a great view.
- Fantastic initial compensation and benefits package
- If you get in with the right group, you're set for life (see con #1)

Cons – - If you don't get in with the main clique or if you anger/annoy any of them, you experience all of the following cons
- No career growth or development. You just get shuffled around with no direction to where they need people (usually the less glamorous teams)
- No positives on the horizon. One of the reasons I had left is that no one around me had seen raises, promotions, or bonuses of any kind for 5+ years.
- Culture is very negative. Very much a thought of "let's just suck it up and do this so we don't get yelled at" instead of "let's do this because it's good business"
- Non IDOL software is extremely buggy and bugs go unfixed for months unless support hammers into development.
- Accountability almost always comes back to support. An issue taken up with management goes to support. Issues in development come from customers to support, back to development, who tries to say that the customer is wrong even if support has verified the issue. Sales reps, on-site consultants, and more- all issues just keep coming back to support.
- Huge turnover. A lot of senior guys who hadn't seen any positives in years left, making it harder to learn or master the products. With only college grads coming in, it's hard to keep experts around.

All that said, it's possible this is all changing due to HP's takeover and executive level changes. So take this with a grain of salt. Make sure this is a job you really want to do before taking the offer or it will hurt your future career.

Advice to Senior Management – I'm aware that the transition to HP is changing things slowly so it may be getting better. But to any still there from Autonomy- good managers reward success, reprimand failure, and shield their team from flak from above. They don't pass the blame and cover their own hide.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

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

Pros – By and large Autonomy has a talented group of individuals, who with the right structure could turn things around.

Cons – Sales - They hire too many sales people and don't properly train them. The effect is that they are effectively massively unproductive, as they are constantly forced to reinvent the wheel.

Technology - While Autonomy has talented engineers there is no focus and no plan. The result is that everyone goes in a million directions with tactical drivers and no strategic focus (efforts focused on break/fix and not on moving the products forward organically)

Services - The implementation team are largely former presales folks and that hurts the organization as each implementation takes far more resources than competitors in the space.

Management - Biggest issue with the management team is a lack of experience, which when combined with success has created a culture where the wrong policies are ingrained because they are incorrectly associated with that success.

Advice to Senior Management – Sales - Align sales staff with HP selling structure (Regional/Matrix management) and hire less sales people and more sales support (Sales Ops, Solutions Engineers, etc) to make sure they are successful.

Technology - There needs to be product management driving development with short and long term road maps. After all how can we expect progress if the engineers don't know where we should be headed.

Services - Here the autonomy services team should be integrated under the HP/EDS services leadership.

Management - It may sound harsh but the sacking of Lynch, Kanter, Menell, et al was a great moving in the right direction, but it won't be fixed until all of the historic leadership who believe in the "Autonomy Culture" are gone.

Generally 95% of the Autonomy workforce is sticking around to see what HP does integration wise, but once its clear that HP integration isn't happening short term there will be a mass Exodus.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Autonomy full-time

Pros – Getting paid to arrive in work when i feel like it, play pool or stand around chatting whilst drinking free coffee, having been given any direction in weeks no one seems to know what's going on.

Cons – The departure of Mike Lynch and he vision he was the reason i joined Autonomy.

Advice to Senior Management – Most employees i speak to have already placed their CV's with recruiters.

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 – Chill job.
Excellent opportunity for those who travel.
$75 per diem

Cons – Horrible system performance. Why can't they invest in better hardware?
No internal promotions
Management sucks
Horrible communication, no email replies from management/HR
no reviews or raises

Advice to Senior Management – Reply to emails sometimes
Adapt a Yearly review/Bonus
Raises? Cost of Living?

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Autonomy full-time

Pros – for high sales performers, the pay is good,
the integration with HP gives some hope for the future
in a few areas, the technology is as strong and unique as the company thinks it is

Cons – - culture lacks integrity, honesty, general decency
- arrogance and dishonesty about own technology - which is often half-baked
- apparent view that people are fungible and easily replaced

Advice to Senior Management – need to reorient focus on development and away from marketing. find some humility quick

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Autonomy

Pros – Not many, a very small percentage of the salespeople are even above plan, less than 15% of the total. Less than 5% make great money

Cons – Horrible resource allocation issues, weeks or months to get customer issues fixed, even with revenue generating activities the restraints are unreal. Three days of product training, all very high level with no specifics, no follow up training. Micromanaged environment with little to no support unless your driving a multi-million dollar transaction.

Advice to Senior Management – Understand the management is changing, the reality is you're not making changes fast enough and are pissing off and/or losing accounts and marketshare.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

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

Pros – Great message. Gives you some thought how the industry is heading towards. Demos are fun to conduct. Usually, my systems consultant conducts the demo at my last job. I had always avoided demos like the plague, but, autonomy makes it easy to demo. Its only 15mins max, real time data, and the eye brows lift when all is said and done. Again, the message is very strong and easily defendable.

Cons – however, the message is very dangerous. Because your corporate message is around "Meaning," and IDOL, it makes them believe 20,000 customers are using a Meaning Based Technology, and they are not. 99% of the customers using Autonomy are basic Content Mgmt, Web Mgmt, basic eDiscovery, basic archiving, and backup/recovery solutions. Nothing more. The projects that are sold as a Meaning Based Technology usually go completely bad. My large deals started to hear negative messages and then in turn, gone completely silent.

That being said, there are some MAJOR integration issues with IDOL. Since IDOL is sold as a connection based solutions that sorta agnostic with other platforms, the RED FLAG pops up when we can not integrated into acquired Autonomy technologies. Even though, we are mandated to talk about IDOL first and then, the solution, 99% of the sales reps paint themselves into a corner, because, when its time to "open up the hood," and talk shop, the integration is not there. Good example is their backup/recovery platform. As a result, their message around Meaning Base Archiving and Meaning Based Backup/Recovery is redundant at best.

As a result, reps are constantly fighting around messaging and opportunities. At Autonomy, there are three pillars they go to market. It doesn't make any sense what so ever (Power, Protect, Promote). All solutions around managing unstructured data. On top of that reps do not have territory and any one rep can sell another pillar. To make things even more confusing, the CRM system does not allow transparency to understand if a customer has some sort of installation, customer is happy or not, current rep has an opportunity in progress, opportunity to leverage another opportunity, or/and we lost an opportunity to a competitor or bad POC. All of which promotes, spinning wheels constantly, major infighting, lack of trust if somebody will steel your deals or not, embarrassment from the customer (we are installed, or/and we threw you out), most importantly, can not plan how to go to market and achieve your numbers.

On top of this elementary and immature business model, you are naturally stressed to force through uncontrollable and bewildering corporate waters to make sense of your daily sales activities. In other words, you need to have five meetings per week, accompanied with five demos, and one proposal a week. Seems easy, yes at first, the vehicle to "assist" you is asinine. The dreaded SMS is a sales tool to forecast, submit meeting notes, indicate demos been completed, and opportunity activities. This will bog your day and frustration will build because of this tool. Now, its not because of the tool itself, its management and some random unnamed management on the SMS calls every week questioning the number of meetings, proposals submitted, and constant questions how it works. SMS is a full time job in itself.

You can have a solid pipeline with deals moving forward with management oversight and if your sms has not been updated because you are staying up late working three large deals, you will get threaten about your job security. Reason being, management gets paid on SMS metics. You can be at 105% on your meetings, submitted 6 out of the 10 proposals (60%) in SMS, and have a not so pleasant call with management.

Proposals. Interesting metric. These are proposals that are mandatory and NEVER used. Its only done to fulfill a metric. It consist a 12 page marketing brief about how we understand the customer's problem, the customer itself, solution reiterated, and the proposed price. Seems like a good idea, but, we need to submit one every customer we talked to before going deep into their real challenges. Its a blind proposal most of the time. BACKWARDS! Furthermore, when submitted through SMS, if it does go through, it routes to Autonomy's marketing team. They will continually try to be relevant by editing the document and adding more steps than necessary, even though, its the same document, message, and customer with a few tweaks.

Another Con is management. Its amazing they can sleep at night. I had heard two reps gotten fired over SMS calls. Just a recap, SMS calls are weekly forecast calls that the whole team is on listening. One particular rep lost a deal because IDOL can not or have any plans to integrate into Connected. Because the rep lost the deal because he had told the customer the honest facts, he was let go over the phone. Great guy and very capable.

Advice to Senior Management – If I am speaking to management, I would say this.... Align yourself with an HP Team and management to gain protection. The management tactics in place today is very sad, knowing that Autonomy could have been much much much more influential in the market place. The patience model is needed to have the right tools in place for the sales team. I would have to say 99.99999% of the sales force was delighted when HP came onboard. Why? Management changes and sales operation changes and territory changes. Sad...

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

Pros – The main focus of the company is to sell, not to develop good quality software. The whole production and sales is governed by a "Let's sell it ASAP, we (may) fix it later" mentality.
Mid-managers are inadequate, they over micro-manage their team members (I call it nano-management).

They are strict about work hours: they record people's arrival and check out times every day. Phone calls are recorded, email communication and internet traffic is monitored heavily. Access to personal email services and many other sites is not allowed by their firewall. I once attempted to access a personal email domain of mine, which the filter did not permit to my surprise. Only a couple minutes later, as I was going downstairs I saw the page I tried to access (my email domain web site bearing my personal logo) in front of the company's Chief Operation Officer!

The HR is inadequate, too: They didn't bother asking me why I was leaving at my exit interview! In fact, they are not aware that the three people (from the same group) who left before me, and the person who resigned after me did so because of the same problem/person. Unfortunately they are not aware that the cause of many of the problems in the company are their control-freak group leaders who are not aware of any modern-day management techniques.

There is no concept of trust in the company. For example, I report a problem to my group leader, he goes to someone else to challenge my claim, treating me like a potential liar in front of everybody, and despite I end up being correct I never get an apology for the shouting and lack of trust. I use a mobile phone to check my emails while getting a coffee outside of the office room, he gets angry and tells me "if you continue to use your phone I will take you to the HR". Very laughable indeed. It was me who went to the HR to resign in the end :) You can't run a company with terror like this, even if you do so you can't expect these qualified people to work for you. Qualified people are hard to find, and they can easily find (better) jobs somewhere else!

Cons – Free lunches, nice Christmas trips every year.

Advice to Senior Management – Don't be afraid to get rid of some of your team leaders! Regularly give negative (if any) and as well as positive feedback to employees. Also get some regular feedback from employees! Don't wait for the exit interviews for that (which are useless at the moment). Improve your bonus scheme and benefits to please your developers.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

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

Pros – Above average payment
Really good marketing to get hired

Cons – External Headhunter is relative to Top management, promise to much acomplish zero
Poor management
A lot of pressure to achieve quota, with no presales support
Most sofware is marketing stuff not real product

Advice to Senior Management – HP manager you should takeover and investigate all top management at BOS, SFO, DAL, you will find not good stuff for stockholders

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