VIC govt picks HP Autonomy for business data search

Victoria's Department of State Development, Business and Innovation (DSDBI) has deployed HP Autonomy's business data search solution to provide a single portal for internal and external information, the US systems vendor announced today.

The information platform, HP Intelligent Data Operating Layer or IDOL can work with a large amount of sources, such as social media, web content and email as well as audio, video, structured data and customer transaction logs, the company says.

According to DSDBI chief information security officer Dr Suresh Hungenahally, the HP IDOL system means users no longer have to search through multiple information sources on separate systems. Instead, access to information is now through a single portal, Dr Hungenahally says.

DSDBI users operate across a variety of systems for information access. These include the department's intranet, shared network drives and Salesforce but also external sources such as Hansard, Victorial Online and the Australian Bureau of Statistics sites.

The large amount information on these is often in different formats, accessible through varying search capabilities and restrictions and DSDBI says its users found it time consuming and inefficient to locate the data they needed.

No details were given as to the cost of DSDBI's IDOL deployment, which was done in conjunction with Australian Autonomy partner Microsearch.

The IDOL product was at the centre of last year's very public legal spat between HP and Autonomy founder Mike Lynch.

HP, which acquired Autonomy, alleged that the search vendor had misrepresented its financial performance before the acquisition, and referred the matter to the US Securities and Exchange Commission's enforcement division, and the UK Serious Fraud Office for civil and criminal investigation.

IDOL was put forward by HP as an example of Autonomy's alleged accounting improprieties and misrepresentations, for example: "The mischaracterisation of revenue from negative-margin, low-end hardware sales with little or no associated software content as 'IDOL product,' and the improper inclusion of such revenue as 'license revenue' for purposes of the organic and IDOL growth calculations," HP stated in November 2012.

In November this year, a United States District judge allowed a legal action by shareholders against HP chief executive Meg Whitman and the company itself to proceed, over allegations that investors were misled about the acquisition of Autonomy.