Vaporware wrapped up in fancy Cambridge talk. Is it still out there?
Still sitting on our boss’ desk in Paris : pride-of-place among his Legaltech swag from days gone by
BY:
Eric De Grasse
Chief Technology Officer
PROJECT COUNSEL MEDIA
31 May 2022 – I read “Judge Details Lynch’s $700k Signoff via iPhone Text in Full Autonomy Judgement”. The main idea is that Autonomy – an early entrant in the smart software for search and content processing – engaged in some business practices which a British judge finds “suggestive”. How suggestive? I am not sure, but the idea of using resellers and transactions to ramp up your revenues is an interesting business plan.
Another search and content processing outfit called Fast Search & Transfer (which Microsoft acquired more than a decade ago) found itself subject to some scrutiny for financial fancy dancing. One of the firm’s founders was found guilty and may have spent some time in the custody of a government. Maybe the fellow was cross country skiing and shooting a rifle at snow bunnies.
The relevance of the cited story and the reference to skis and weapons reminds me that the financial reports of high-flying search and content processing companies have to be scrutinized. I mention this because some of the more interesting search and content processing centric companies are publicly traded. Palantir Technologies comes to mind because I have seen a couple of semi-optimistic write ups about the company.
If I were a more youthful 55 year old and not approaching retirement, I would muster the energy to:
1. Investigate the US government and UK government contracts for term, sunset dates, and contracting officers (what’s the background of these individuals)
2. Research the question, “What’s bundled into the basic commercial and the basic government deal?”
3. Explore the question, “How is cost of sales reacting to the economic climate since Palantir went public?”
4. Try to determine answers to these questions: “What’s the ratio of sales people to programmers? The ratio of full time equivalents to contractors? How has the ratio changed since the firm went public?”
5. Interview some people at LE and intel conferences to get a sense of the chatter related to this question: “Is Palantir bundling Amazon cloud services or does the licensee have a choice?” and “Has there been talk of Palantir providing a ‘system in a box’ to licensees with this requirement?”
Why think about these types of questions? Oh, I am just curious about search and content processing outfits. Not eDiscovery companies which handle simple static databases. I mean companies like Cognizant, Splunk, Mu Sigma, Tableau, Tyler Technologies, Verint, etc. which provide industrial-strength software applications for integrating, visualizing, and analyzing information.
The Autonomy documents are now almost a decade old, but they provide useful information for anyone considering an investment in (or purchase of) an organization engaged in enterprise search and/or text analysis software. The documents that popped out during all of the HP/Autonomy litigations provided some of the factual foundation serious analysts use for reports and deep-dive analysis, with detailed analysis of the revenue potential of search and text processing (including almost every eDiscovery vendor at the time). There are gold mines of information out there.
And, yeah, vaporware is still out there, too.
