HP Wants to Optimize Your Information, Whatever That Means

Ever since Hewlett-Packard announced that it would spend $11.7 billion to acquire the British software firm Autonomy, there have been questions regarding how that company will fit within HP. HP will answer some of those questions today, with a big announcement of a new enterprise hardware, software and services platform at a company event in Vienna. HP calls it its Next Generation Information Platform, IDOL 10. Practically speaking, it includes not only Autonomy, with its software smarts around finding meaning in unstructured data as varied as TV interview transcripts or chains of email communications; and the analytical muscle of Vertica, a company HP acquired in February. The way HP sees it — and, to be fair, it's not the first company to make this kind of argument — the ratio of data that businesses are creating to what they actually use productively is pretty big. Only 15 percent of that information is neatly organized into the rows and columns of a traditional relational database, HP argues, leaving a lot more information — fully 85 percent — that would be useful if you could only capture it, determine its meaning, and analyze it: Video, audio, email, texts, social media, meeting notes. Add to that the explosion of other real-world information gathered from sensors and other measuring devices, and it gets even more complex. It's a concept that HP is calling "information optimization."

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