HP Autonomy

HP Autonomy, previously Autonomy Corporation PLC, is a multinational enterprise software company founded in Cambridge, United Kingdom in 1996. Originally, the company specialised in analysis of large scale unstructured "big data", becoming the UK's largest and most successful software business by 2010. It used a combination of technologies born out of research at the University of Cambridge and developed a variety of enterprise search and knowledge management applications using adaptive pattern recognition techniques centered on Bayesian inference in conjunction with traditional methods. It maintained an aggressively entrepreneurial marketing approach, and controls described as a "rod of iron", which was said to include zero tolerance and firing the weakest 5% of its sales force each quarter, while cosseting the best sales staff "like rock stars". Autonomy was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in October 2011.