HP Autonomy Intelligent Universal Search (discontinued) vs. OpenSearch

It does a decent job at its core functions (that other free software does just as well or better).

OpenSearch Service presents a cost-effective pricing model, allowing users to pay solely for their usage without being burdened by minimum fees or upfront commitments. Its seamless integration with various AWS services enhances its adaptability for a wide range of data analysis requirements and also I love using it isn't it enough.

• It adheres to traditional Microsoft standards such as: fact-dump documentation with no coherent story or 'best practices' information, inability to automate common tasks, intentional obfuscation of its basic operations.
• It provides OK search results. Not great, but OK.

• Gives us millisecond response times
• Mainly open-source
• Integration Seamlessly with AWS
• Has a very big community so problems are fixes sooner then later

• There are about a dozen different config files to maintain, and the most important one is dynamically modified by Autonomy itself while it runs. Which means that it is impossible to automate the configuration or keep the configs in versioned source control. Even `cp *.cfg ~/cfgbak/` won't help you roll back a change, because it is never safe to restore a previous config. You'll be using `diff new.cfg old.cfg` a lot.
• The Linux port is poorly thought out. The binaries are named *.exe. The StartService.sh scripts contain both `echo 'Are you sure you want to start the service? Hit ctrl-C to cancel''; read dummy` and, I kid you not, a `chmod a+x /path/to/my/binary.exe`.
• Many features are poorly documented, leading to lots of back and forth with the support department just to answer basic questions like "what does this error code in my logs signify?"
• It seems to reinvent the wheel, poorly, everywhere. E.g. the scheduled backup feature rolls through a user-defined finite list of directories in which to store backups. On day 0 it uses directory 0, on day 1 it uses directory 1, and after day N it rolls back and overwrites directory 0. Why would this be preferable to using a single directory and naming zip files based on the current timestamp?

• Needs more descriptive documentation
• The UI feels a bit old
• Some functionality still doesn't work correctly

Management wants to see ROI on the (hefty) cost of purchasing this software, and has mandated that we continue using it. We would prefer to switch immediately.

Well as I said, Elastic is behind paywall now and managing OpenSearch through AWS is so seamless that we just love it. It gets updates faster we don't have to manage separate infra and many other settings to work with elastic search and some of the tools that it provides are better then them.

• I have learned to tack a zero onto the end of any estimate I make for how long an Autonomy change will take in both planning and implementation.

• Well we had 200 ms response times which decreased to 100ms while using OpenSearch
• Easy to use security plugins we dont need external IAM
• Super Easy Integration with many AWS Services such as kinsesi data stream and dynamoDB