Re: Creepy 'Maths qualified' Salespeople
I was intrigued by the prospects of Autonomy when I lived & worked in Cambridge. Businesses generate petabytes of data, and sometimes asking how they organise that data just gets a finger pointed at a pile of server racks. Or in the general direction of a passing cloud. So it's always been a challenge to find useful data when you need it, and the promise of something that can manage unstructured data was appealing.
So I think it's a bit unfair to say it was 'just' a search engine, because so is grep. Or Google's search appliances. But I also wondered a) did it work? and b) how much of a ball-ache it would be to restructure existing company systems, data and procedures so it could then be searched.