HP Autonomy Intelligent Universal Search (discontinued) vs. IBM Watson Content Analytics

It does a decent job at its core functions (that other free software does just as well or better).

It is well suited for those who are beginners and want to get hands-on with data analysis. It is also easy to learn as the UI is simple and understandable. It can be improved on provided some discounts in the pricing.

Incentivized

• It adheres to traditional Microsoft standards such as: fact-dump documentation with no coherent story or 'best practices' information, inability to automate common tasks, intentional obfuscation of its basic operations.
• It provides OK search results. Not great, but OK.

• Easy Interface - Drag and click based UI.
• Good amount of tools for visualization.
• Less amount of time taken to perform analysis.

Incentivized

• There are about a dozen different config files to maintain, and the most important one is dynamically modified by Autonomy itself while it runs. Which means that it is impossible to automate the configuration or keep the configs in versioned source control. Even `cp *.cfg ~/cfgbak/` won't help you roll back a change, because it is never safe to restore a previous config. You'll be using `diff new.cfg old.cfg` a lot.
• The Linux port is poorly thought out. The binaries are named *.exe. The StartService.sh scripts contain both `echo 'Are you sure you want to start the service? Hit ctrl-C to cancel''; read dummy` and, I kid you not, a `chmod a+x /path/to/my/binary.exe`.
• Many features are poorly documented, leading to lots of back and forth with the support department just to answer basic questions like "what does this error code in my logs signify?"
• It seems to reinvent the wheel, poorly, everywhere. E.g. the scheduled backup feature rolls through a user-defined finite list of directories in which to store backups. On day 0 it uses directory 0, on day 1 it uses directory 1, and after day N it rolls back and overwrites directory 0. Why would this be preferable to using a single directory and naming zip files based on the current timestamp?

• The software is semi-limited to indexing and searching.
• Software does not force a specific "structure" as some document management systems do.

Incentivized

Management wants to see ROI on the (hefty) cost of purchasing this software, and has mandated that we continue using it. We would prefer to switch immediately.

IBM Watson is not quite in the same category as Worldox or NetDocuments as both are full-fledged document management. However, both vendors provide a similar searching and indexing product. Worldox provides searching and indexing but the Indexer is somewhat prone to issues. IBM Watson does not have the stability/consistency issues. NetDocuments is cloud-hosted document management and its index does not seem to have issues. That being said, there is a large premium as the data is all stored in a cloud container with the management system.

Incentivized

• I have learned to tack a zero onto the end of any estimate I make for how long an Autonomy change will take in both planning and implementation.

• Organized, easy to produce search results.
• Never lose a document again.

Incentivized