Autonomy Reviews

I worked at Autonomy for more than a year

Pros – Honestly can't even think of anything positive of Autonomy, sadly. It had great brand name of Interwoven, people were great

Cons – In APAC, it was a nightmare. Past management prior HP acquisition was a total shocker. Poor leadership (locally and globally). Product marketing is half baked. Sales ppl ware asked to perform regardless. Unfortunately, this is not the place to be if you want to contribute to a proper working environment that you could excel in your career.

Advice to Senior Management – Listen to employees and customers.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I worked at Autonomy full-time for more than a year

Pros – You aren't held to your ancillary metric of calls so long as you perform the actual task of sourcing meetings.
Fairly relaxed environment except when management is present.
Free breakfast Wednesday, free lunch Friday.

Cons – You cannot advance within the company and there is zero track for career growth.
Management is pompous, vindictive and petty. A company of many bads ideas.
Don't confuse motion with action.

Advice to Senior Management – Quit. There's no hope for these people. I would say accept input from your staff but that's already in place in a kind of shrewd attempt at feigning interest.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I have been working at Autonomy full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – None. They bought our company and destroyed it. They didn't care about customers and cared less about employees.

The only "pro" is that HP have purchased us and everything is better. It was almost an immediate turn around in terms of message. Focus is back on customer satisfaction and it's very clear that employees are considered valuable again.

Everything

Cons – I was always proud of how much my company cared about our customers and employees and then Autonomy bought us. They clearly didn't care about our customers at all. Everything was about "new license revenue". So sorry if you were already a customer.

They treated employees like a commodity that could be replaced on a whim. It was truly a terrible few years until HP purchased us and saved us from the horrible policies and behaviour of Autonomy.

I worked at Autonomy full-time for more than a year

Pros – Great vacation allowance. Free lunch Fridays.
Maybe HP can fix some of the mess?

Cons – Everything else.
No review/raise process. Impossible to get promoted.
Unethical sales tactics like I've never seen anywhere else.
Support and services left holding the bag with a poor quality product that is next to impossible to implement and support.
Secret engineering team that nobody is allowed to actually talk to. You NEVER receive feedback on any bugs submitted unless you are working with the latest hot customer (the one with the most new business riding on the success of your project). Although I can't imagine they actually get any repeat customers. I think Lynch and Co. knew they were running out of suckers and that they had no good reference customers left and that's why they sold.
Everything is a fire drill - even planned implementations with a long sales cycle are staffed at the last minute. PS Consultants are shipped from one project to another in a big circle as each new customer becomes frustrated with the lack of knowledge and poor quality products.

Advice to Senior Management – Keep purging all of the Autonomy middle management and horrible anti-customer anti-support, anti-employee policies.

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

I worked at Autonomy full-time for more than a year

Pros – Job security. Plenty of lateral job mobility for competent employees. Offices in many parts of the world.

Cons – Widespread incompetence. Predatory management. Dysfunctional business processes. Starved for resources, because nobody is willing to spend money to make money.

Advice to Senior Management – Mutual trust and repsect is better than fear and bullying. You will retain more quality employees that way, and gain their loyalty. Loyal, competent employees accomplish great things in less time and fewer resources, and you are judged by higher management by the accomplishments of your underlings.

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

I have 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

I 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

I have 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

I 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

I 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