Autonomy Corporation Totally Explained

Everything about Autonomy Corporation totally explained

Autonomy Corporation PLC is an enterprise software company with joint head quarters in Cambridge, United Kingdom, and San Francisco, USA. It is generally considered to be the technology leader in the Enterprise Search search sector as well as being the leader in revenue, customer numbers, and for public companies in revenue growth. The company has grown rapidly from being a start up in 1996 utilizing a unique combination of technologies borne out of research at the University of Cambridge to becoming Europe's second largest pure software company after SAP. It develops a variety of enterprise search and knowledge management applications using adaptive pattern recognition techniques centered on Bayesian inference (statistical inference in which evidence or observations are used to update or to newly infer the probability that a hypothesis may be true) in conjunction with traditional methods.
Autonomy is a proponent in the rapidly growing area of Meaning-Based Computing (MBC). The company has experienced a rapid rise and currently has a market cap of $4 billion with offices worldwide. Autonomy's position as the industry leader is widely proclaimed and supported by analysts including Gartner Group, Forrester Research, and Delphi, which calls Autonomy the fastest growing public company in the space. Autonomy's revenues are twice that of its nearest rival. In November 2007, Autonomy Corporation was presented with an award for the best performing software company in Europe by the European Commissioner for IT.

What Does Autonomy Do?

The main technology is called Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), and is to unstructured information what an RDBMS is to structured information. IDOL allows search and processing of text, audio, video, and structured information. The processing of such information by IDOL is referred to by industry analysts (such as IDC) as the Meaning-Based Computing sector. At its core, Autonomy's technology can understand any form of unstructured information, whether text, voice, or video, and based on that understanding perform automatic operations on the information.

Autonomy Corporation Customer Base

Autonomy's customer base is comprised of more than 17,000 global companies and organizations including: 3, ABN AMRO, AOL, BAE Systems, BBC, Bloomberg, Boeing, Citigroup, Coca Cola, Daimler Chrysler, Deutsche Bank, Ericsson, Ford, GlaxoSmithKline, Lloyd TSB, NASA, Nestle, the New York Stock Exchange, Reuters, Shell, T-Mobile, The Newsmarket, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Autonomy also has over 300 OEM partners and more than 400 VARs and integrators, numbering among them are leading companies such as BEA, Business Objects, Citrix, EDS, IBM Global Services, Novell, Satyam, Sybase, Symantec, TIBCO, Vignette, and Wipro.

Corporate Information

Autonomy was founded in Cambridge, England in 1996 by Dr Michael Lynch as a spin-off from Cambridge Neurodynamics. The spinoff was created along with David Tabizel and Richard Gaunt.
Autonomy issued its IPO in 1998 onto the Easdaq exchange at a share price of approximately 30p. At the height of the "dot com bubble", the peak share price was £30. Post bubble, it hit a low of 80p. It has been one of the best performing European technology stocks since then and the share price on Oct 30, 2007 topped 1000p giving a rise of over 100% in the last year.
Autonomy is currently listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index. Autonomy had revenues for 2006 of $250M up 161% on 2005 and a market capitalization of over $4.5Bn (Oct 07). Revenues for 2008 are expected to top $450M. It is a very rare example of a European pure software company and has an operating margin near 40%. Revenues have grown at 161% year on year with organic (non acquisition growth) of 30%.(Q2 2007)

Locations

Autonomy has major offices in Canada, US, UK, France, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Munich, and offices throughout Europe and Latin America.

Acquisitions and Spin-offs

In 2002, Autonomy acquired Softsound, a small company out of Cambridge University developing speech recognition software.

In 2003, they acquired Virage, a software developer of video search software.

In May 2003 acquired broadcast content management company, Dremedia.

In June 2005, acquired etalk in the call center software sector.

In December 2005 Autonomy acquired Verity, one of its main competitors, for approximately $500m. This acquisition won them an award for best acquisition from the London stock exchange.

In May 2007 after exercising an option to buy a stake of technology start up, Blinkx Inc, and combining it with its consumer division, Autonomy spun out Blinkx Plc which was IPOed in London at a value over $250M.

In July 2007 it acquired ZANTAZ, the leading email archiving and litigation support company, for $375M.

Autonomy's Board of Directors

Dr Michael Richard Lynch

Richard PerleFurther Information

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