UK Serious Fraud Office Probes Autonomy With ... Autonomy!
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judgecorp writes "The British Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is investigating whether British software firm Autonomy fiddled its accounts to inflate the price which HP paid for it to a whopping $10 billion. There's a problem though. Autonomy's Introspect software is used to trawl large data sets for information and is in use at the SFO for jobs such as this fraud investigation. It's not just ironic: the SFO says its £4.6 million contract with Autonomy could create a conflict of interest and it may have to pull out of the investigation."
Re:Not sure if it's a conflict (Score:5, Insightful)
Except those are not analytics software. Autonomy's software is designed to find patterns and preforms advanced heuristics. It doesn't just store data without making judgements on it. This is a big difference as most analytics software rely on ever changing patterns and rulesets that are maintained by the manufacturer. In fact, much of this software runs on the software manufacturer's servers, making it possible and even easy for Autonomy to "adjust" unfavorable results.