Hewlett Packard revealed the first fruits of the controversial acquisition of unstructured  analytics software maker Autonomy.  The offerings provide an opportunity for commercial and governmental customers to sort through their big data, and has built up a very large sales channel (alongside an equally large market share, which were among the drivers behind the deal).

“The new products should help business and government customers parse information from a variety of sources, from traditional financial records to social networking posts, and identify useful patterns or trends, according to HP Executive Vice President Michael Lynch, who was a co-founder and CEO of Autonomy until HP bought the company this fall.”

One of the new and upgraded Autonomy products is the updated  IDOL, the HP subsidiary’s flagship product that has been integrated with Hewlett-Packard hardware and structured data analytics software. In addition, a series of appliances was launched that also includes Autonomy components in it, but serve other purposes such as policy and legal compliance.

Jeff Kelly provided his own take about the updated product, which he thinks will play a big role in the company’s big data strategy thanks to its hybrid processing capabilities.

“Vertica’s database is adept at quickly loading and processing large amounts of structured data, while Autonomy’s software is adept at deriving meaning from large volumes of unstructured text found in emails, documents, Tweets and other sources.”

Hewlett agreed to pay $10.3 billion for Lynch’s company, which, when joined with previous plans that suggest HP may push towards software, meant his idea that Autonomy is HP’s future wasn’t so far-fetched.  It may not be so true now however, in light of some more recent developments. This latest is, however, undoubtedly a very significant one, according to SA founder John Furrier, partially thanks to  the way its previous investments come in the picture.

“The engine that is really driving the innovation and sales for this strategy is 3Par. HP is wrapping the recycled Autonomy and Vertica around the storage and converged enterprise platform mainly 3PAR and StoreOnce.”

eBay’s Meg Whiteman who has been serving as the chief executive of Hewlett-Packard for a few months now, announced she will not realize the prospect of spinning of the company’s $40 billion PC unit.  Nevertheless the sum her company paid for Autonomy did take away some of its shareholders’ confidence in the company, despite it won’t be doing any more acquisition in the near future. Now, HP is busy maximizing the RoI of its $10 billion buy.