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Autonomy Corporation headquarters at Cambridge Business Park.

Autonomy Corporation is a multinational enterprise software company founded in Cambridge, United Kingdom in 1996, which became a subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard in October 2011. The company has joint headquarters in Cambridge and San Francisco, USA.

The company uses a combination of technologies born out of research at the University of Cambridge. It develops a variety of enterprise search and knowledge management applications using adaptive pattern recognition techniques centered on Bayesian inference in conjunction with traditional methods.

History[link]

Autonomy was founded in Cambridge, England by Dr Michael Lynch and Richard Gaunt in 1996 as a spin-off from Cambridge Neurodynamics.^[3]

Autonomy floated in 1998 on the EASDAQ exchange at a share price of approximately £0.30. At the height of the "dot com bubble", the peak share price was £30.^[4]

In December 2005 Autonomy acquired Verity, Inc., one of its main competitors, for approximately US$500m.^[5] In 2005 Autonomy also acquired Neurodynamics.^[6]

In May 2007, after exercising an option to buy a stake in technology start up Blinkx Inc, and combining it with its consumer division, Autonomy floated Blinkx on a valuation of $250m.^[7]

In July 2007 it acquired Zantaz, an email archiving and litigation support company, for $375m.^[8]

In October 2007 Autonomy acquired Meridio Holdings Ltd, a UK company based in Northern Ireland that specialised in Records Management software, for £20m.^[9]

In January 2009 it acquired Interwoven, a niche provider of enterprise content management software, for $775m.^[10] Interwoven became Autonomy Interwoven and Autonomy iManage.

In June 2010 the company announced that it was to acquire the Information Governance business of CA Technologies. Terms of the sale were not disclosed.^[11]

Model of 2010 Mercedes GP Petronas Formula One Team car at the Cambridge Business Park Autonomy building lobby.

On 5 May 2011 the Mercedes GP Formula One team announced an $8 million sponsorship deal with Autonomy, and on 8 July 2010 Tottenham Hotspur FC announced a two year sponsorship deal with Autonomy for their Premier League kit.^[12][13] For the 2011-12 season Spurs' Premier League shirt will feature Autonomy's Augmented Reality technology Aurasma.^[14]

On 16 May 2011 Autonomy acquired Iron Mountain Digital, a pioneer in E-discovery and online backup solutions provider, for $380m.^[15]

On 18 August 2011 Hewlett Packard announced that it would purchase Autonomy for US$42.11 per share, around $10.2B. The transaction was unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both HP and Autonomy. The Autonomy board unanimously recommended that its shareholders accept the offer.^[16] On 3 October 2011 HP closed the deal with over 87% of Autonomy shares acquired.^[17]

In May 2012 Mike Lynch resigned from his role as Autonomy CEO.^[18]

Products[link]

Bayes' theorem spelt in neon at the offices of Autonomy in Cambridge.

The main technology, 'Intelligent Data Operating Layer' (IDOL), allows search and processing of text taken from database, audio, video or text files or streams. The processing of such information by IDOL is referred to by Autonomy as Meaning-Based Computing.^[19]

Autonomy's technology attempts to "understand" any form of unstructured information, including text, voice, and video, and based on that understanding perform automatic operations, for example inferring what the user wants and on that basis finding other information that may be of interest.

On 29 November 2011, HP announced a new big data Analytics platform, "HP Next Generation Information Platform", based on a combination of Autonomy’s unstructured data analytics engine, IDOL 10 and Vertica's fast-loading, real-time analytics database.^[20][21]This strategic move by HP is part of its refocus on enterprise software and maximisation of data volume, variety and velocity. The platform will combine structured with unstructured data, which comprises about 80% of the data on the Web such as video, pictures, emails etc., and handle them in a unified manner.

Customers[link]

Autonomy has over 400 OEM partners, more than 400 vendors and integrators, and over 20,000 customers, including BP, Halliburton, Royal Dutch Shell, BAE Systems, AstraZeneca, United States Department of Defense, United States Department of Homeland Security, Citigroup and Symantec.^[22]

Offices[link]

Autonomy has twin head offices in Cambridge, UK and San Francisco, USA, major offices in the US, the UK, Canada, France, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Germany, and smaller offices in India and throughout Europe and Latin America.

Senior management[link]

Many of Autonomy's senior executives left after the acquisition by Hewlett-Packard, "amid accusations that HP is too bureaucratic, and counterclaims that Lynch and his team failed to deliver on revenue targets"^[23]. The membership of the company's management team at any time is available on the company Web site^[6].

References[link]

External links[link]

• Company site
• "The Quest for Meaning" WIRED
• What Is Meaning-Based Computing?
• Michael Lynch On Meaning-Based Computing

Competitors[link]

• List of enterprise search vendors