Brian Proffitt of Read Write Web reports, “A year after Hewlett-Packard’s head-scratching acquisition of semantic-search company Autonomy for $10.3 billion, the move seems to have blown up in HP’s face. HP is admitting today ‘serious accounting improprieties’ by Autonomy. Serious indeed. HP’s fourth-quarter earnings will reflect an $8.8 billion write-down related to the improprieties. Overall, HP is reporting a 4Q loss of $6.9 billion, a bad skid for a company that seems more out of control every day. When the deal was initially brokered by HP’s then-CEO Léo Apotheker in August 2011, there were a lot of ‘what the hell?’ comments flying around. HP had just bought a UK business that did not seem to fit HP’s business model.” Read more

Autonomy, an HP Company, has announced that “Textkernel, an innovative provider of multilingual semantic recruitment technology, will embed Autonomy IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer) technology in the new version of its resume parsing solution Extract!. Extract! helps companies streamline recruitment processes by automatically parsing the information contained in a resume or social media profile, and building out a single, complete candidate profile. Because the content, layout, and formatting of resumes vary significantly in every case, automating this extraction process requires technology which can process information in any format.” Read more

HP has revealed its plans for Autonomy, a semantic search company that HP acquired last summer. Scott M. Fulton reports, “Today, under new CEO Meg Whitman, the company revealed some of the fruits of that acquisition, including support for the Hadoop big-data file system and a new product intended to help marketing folks better understand who uses their websites. The killer app for big data, according to HP — and thus for Autonomy — is consumer sentiment analytics: the ability to glean from the Web’s enormous collection of textual communication the gist of what buyers are saying about a given product or service. Read more

A new article reports that “Hewlett-Packard is looking to dump — er, spin out its PC business, and confirms that it has bought database and analytics vendor Autonomy for $10.3 billion. Plus, it is discontinuing its WebOS-based tablets and smartphones. Prepare for a major shift in the tech business and an acceleration of the ‘consumerized IT’ trend in which business users increasingly drive technology adoption and usage — and traditional IT moves further and further into the back office.” Read more