Pros

Great technology suite means that many clients may show interest to learn more about Autonomy products.

Cons

If there was a -ZERO- Ranking of companies, Autonomy would be Number One!
Only Drone Workers need Apply! Intelligent Workers will be "dumbed-down" at Autonomy

If you are acquired by Autonomy, - run away. If you are considering a job opportunity, - be prepared for hell. If you are an M&A executive of a corporation considering to buy, - just wait until the customers run away and get it pennies for the dollar.
Autonomy won't care who you are nor your fair balanced ways to improve business. They will go as far to tell you, "we acquired you and not the other way around".
Abusive-Manage-by-Fear style by Autonomy executives makes the behavior roll down hill. If your manager can't take the heat, be prepared for yelling fear mongering threats such as "do this in 5 minutes or you are fired" or other abusive tactics.
VP of HR won't do anything about any verbal abuses since they have no power
Autonomy Management constantly lie and talk in circles. Don't believe anything unless its in writing, and if its in writing, be prepared to have to litigate.
Everything is recorded including every second of your productivity; including inbound and outbound telephone calls. Outbound calls made to some of Autonomy's largest customers and prospects are never notified their calls are being recorded and low middle-management was told the calls are held for 15 minutes before they are deleted. .
Autonomy won't give you reviews, so forget about raises
Be prepared to be micromanaged unlike anything you have ever experienced.
Everyone is expendable and Autonomy executives actually enjoy saying that.
Autonomy Executives have told salespeople to 1/ never say we don't do -x- with our product 2/ never say we don't have -x- product or capability 3/ never say we aren't compatible with -x- - and to go against that means you are expendable.
Customers are fed up with lies, run-around and lack of Autonomy promises.
Crippling bottleneck of expenses. If you want to expense $50.01 be prepared to have it sent to the UK for approval.
Upper Management do not have decision making power unless they are one of the ExecutiveGroup-Of-5 in Cambridge, this makes it challenging to accomplish business decisions in a timely manner.
If you are an independent thinker with fresh ideas to contribute to improve business operations or the bottom line, take your skills and talents elsewhere.
Autonomy Executives will make it known, they don't care about talent and everyone is expendable.

Advice to Senior Management

If you cannot reduce the size of your ego, at least learn to take employee suggestions to heart. Unless of course, Autonomy is a front for another line of business.....

Pros

the compensation is accelerated given both the industry and economic times. The benefits package rivals those of the largest companies on the planet.

Cons

be careful what you wish for. there are consequenses for the compensation being as generous as it is - you are treated as a replaceable cog in a large wheel. zero consideration is given to quality of life concerns. you are expected to start sprinting and run until you fall. there is no career path at autonomy, only hightened stress, abusive management, and high pay if successful.

Advice to Senior Management

autonomy will fail if it does not leverage its existing base of accounts for cross selling and up selling opportunities.

Pros

Plenty of opportunities to work on exciting new technologies, and there are still some very talented folks there

Cons

Complete disconnect from HQ in UK, and overall somber mood in the office.

Advice to Senior Management

I could write a book on it, but nobody would read it.

Pros

seems to be on the leading edge of technology, company is doing well, good to have job in this economy

Cons

no transparecy, no raises, micro managment, no trust, Complete disconnect from HQ in UK, and overall somber mood in the office.

Advice to Senior Management

Trust your people, treat them in a fair way. Let the managers manage their own people. Stop the insane SMS calls. Approach your employees in a positive way. I am confident that this will increase the revenue!

Pros

The products are great to sell, great customer names, good marketing support, payment isn't bad.

Cons

At Autonomy the employees are not trusted in advance. I will never recommend Autonomy to people who are looking for a job. My direct manager will be passed time after time and Cambridge wants to be in tight control over all employees and activities. The result of the way how Autonomy is being managed is that many people are leaving and the ones who stay are trying to be 'of the radar'. For us as sales reps does it mean that the sales support is very poor. In the SMS calls on Mondays all the people involved are shouting about things they do not understand. Another ridiculous new rule is that sales reps will be fined for $5000 if they do not meet the minimum number of meetings and proposals!

Advice to Senior Management

Trust your people, treat them in a fair way. Let the managers manage their own people. Stop the insane SMS calls. Approach your employees in a positive way. I am confident that this will increase the revenue!

Pros

The offices at Autonomy are nice. All of the offices across the company are very nice. Most of the people that you interacted with on a day-to-day basis were very talented, dedicated, intelligent and worked very hard.

Cons

The company operates under a fear-and-intimidation style of upper management. They want to make it certain, from the first day on the job, that you know you are dissposable. The most disfunctional company culture I've ever seen.

Advice to Senior Management

I honeslty don't think Upper Management would ever take advice from its employees. But, fear-and-intimidation management styles only get short-term results. I would put more effort into enabling talented employees to do their job and less effort into thinking up ways to squeeze more productivity out of them through threatining their job.

Pros

Some of the technology is excellent and genuinely exciting but theres far too much overlap due to the number of acquisitions.

Bonuses and pay rises can be good but you won't know when or if you're going to get them.

Cons

No feedback on performance, you'll either be told via email that you're getting an bonus/pay rise or you'll receive no feedback regardless of the amount of work you're putting in.

Far too much micro-management from the top level. Simple things like holiday arrangements are controlled by senior management despite them not knowing or you are or what your're actually working on. Middle management have very little control and are largely tasked with reporting to the senior levels.

Product development is purely sales driven, nothing happens without a sale or potential sale. When the sale does happen the pressure is put on the development team to get the product out the door as fast as possible, often with unrealistic schedules.

For a company that sees information as all important theres very little internal communication and no discussion.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop the micro managing, there are excellent mid level managers who helped build succesful companys before Autonomy stepped in.

Make the process behind pay reviews and bonuses review more transparent, especially for non sales.

Unrealistic development schedules need to be addressed, the quality of the product is suffering.

Pros

Financial upside for a select few. Good opportunity to geek out over pretty amazing technology.

Cons

Poor internal/external communication (seemingly by design)
Transactional Sales/Account Model doesn't support customer success
Extreme Micromanagement leads to a focus on low value KPI's.
Professional Integrity is an issue throughout. Executive Management will stand in a room, look you in the eye, and bend the truth.

Advice to Senior Management

Open your mind to ideas that originate outside of Cambridge, and you may actually retain some of the market share and talent from your acquisitions.

Pros

The products and technology from Autonomy itself and from it's many acquisitions have a huge amount of potential. Given the right vision and leadership, the products could be fairly compelling.

Cons

There is no vision and leadership, and this permeates the culture. I personally witnessed a thriving vibrant company filled with brilliant extremely hard working people transformed into a group so micromanaged and information starved that most of those who were no laid off left very soon after the corporate office started intervening.

Independent thought and personal responsibility is actively squashed, somewhat weird given the name of the company isn't it?

Advice to Senior Management

While the balance sheets look great, they are misleading. Hand the company over to new leadership that has at least a minimal amount of respect for customers and employees and allows management below the C*O level to actually make decisions. At some point enough customers and potential employees will communicate with their peers that sales and recruiting will suffer.

Pros

Autonomy tends to hire intelligent, hard working employees that are willing to adapt to the unique corporate culture. Employees will be exposed to many aspects of the business and provided with a lot of responsibility and opportunity to prove oneself.

Cons

Autonomy is a very reactionary company that puts more time and money into marketing and corporate perception than it does into product development and customer care. In general there is a culture of winning at all costs with little concern about business ethics or employee welfare. Employees will be expected to stretch the truth or outright lie in order to win a deal, which seems to happen more often than not.

Having joined the company through an acquisition, I can say that it's an uphill battle for anyone not hired directly by Autonomy. It is assumed that you are beneath Autonomy's standard of excellence until you prove otherwise (if you're even given the chance). I have seen the majority of my coworkers be let go or driven out with no plan to hire replacements, leaving the remaining employees to pick up the work. If you don't take a big gulp of the Kool-Aid and step in line you won't last long at Autonomy.

Advice to Senior Management

Show some concern and proactive effort in improving the quality of life for employees. Initiate some sort of performance review to allow for feedback to flow both directions. Compensation adjustments, bonuses, and option grants have no rhyme or reason to them and seem completely subjective.