HP, Autonomy tackle corporate portal chaos

Hewlett Packard (HP) will bundle information management technology from UK firm Autonomy with its enterprise portal software to help users better organise their portals.

The so-called Portal in a Box package will include Autonomy's dynamic reasoning engine technology, combined with HP's enterprise portal software. The companies said it would enable users to automatically handle unstructured information within their portals without the need for manual tagging.

Chris Harris-Jones, senior consultant at Ovum, said that the technology would be welcome because portals alone are not enough to manage corporate information. "A portal gives a window on information, and if information is disorganised, all a portal does is give a window on chaos. A portal does not organise content," he said.

Harris-Jones added that it was important for companies to practise good housekeeping so that their information was well structured and organised, in order to get the most from their portal.

Doug McGowan, general manager for HP's E-services unit, said: "Customers deploying portal solutions need a way to manage and process large volumes of unstructured information. Autonomy's technology automates the most costly tasks associated with maintaining a portal solution."

"Our combined offering will not only save HP customers time and money, but also enhance employee productivity by delivering the relevant, personalised information people need to make better informed decisions," he added.

With its pattern matching technology, Autonomy has applied probability theories based on the work of Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes, and other information theories, to develop a much stronger type of search algorithm. This technology works by extracting key ideas from the pattern and frequency of words rather than the keywords used by conventional search engines.

In this way, the technology 'reads between the lines' to identify and rank the main concepts within any piece of text, regardless of its language or format.

The total cost of complete packages is expected to average around $1m.