A home-grown tech success story

We don’t really “do” global tech giants very well in this country, do we? Depending on whom you talk to, this could be because of the lack of financial aid from government, poorly resourced universities, a general malaise inhibiting all but the very strongest entrepreneurial spirit, or our national tendency not to want to make a fuss.

According to James TerKeurst, who runs the Institute of Digital Innovation (IDI), a lot of it comes down to an impatience and lack of business savvy that afflicts many potential tech entrepreneurs in this country.

You can probably count the number of UK tech giants on one hand, one and a half at a stretch, but first on anyone’s list would be Autonomy. Founded back in 1996 by Mike Lynch and Richard Gaunt as a spin-off from a Cambridge University research project, the company has, in its own words, experienced a meteoric rise to the point where it is now valued at about $4bn (£2.4bn). Making a name for itself originally in what became known as enterprise search, it is one of those infuriating companies whose roster of products is now so wide ranging that only the most general of monikers ­ “infrastructure software firm” ­ can be used to describe it adequately.

Autonomy’s core technology is Idol, or Intelligent Data Operating Layer ­ an insanely complex bit of technology which somehow manages to detect meaning in unstructured information and perform operations on that information. This meaning-based computing mantra has been at the heart of Autonomy for more than a decade and stood it in good stead. The firm has been more shrewd than is almost possible to believe for a UK technology company, first acquiring search and process management provider Verity for a cool $500m, and a couple of years ago content archiving supplier Zantaz for $375m. In January this year came the long-awaited move into content management with the acquisition of Interwoven.

But just when you think Autonomy has staked out its place in the tech market, it goes and announces a giant leap into another area ­ structured content. Autonomy is now applying Idol to the database market, to the curiosity and fascination of industry watchers. The concept is simple: point the meaning-based computing engine at databases and let it bring an intelligence to the market that has been so far lacking. Although databases are great for some things, they work in black and white, according to Lynch, and we have all become so used to using them, we have forgotten these inherent limitations.

The new Idol Structured Probabilistic Engine detects the shades of grey ­ returning, for example, entries similar to a query if the ones requested are not available. The possibilities, according to analysts, are pretty much endless, and although it might be a while before we see the true value, some early examples Lynch gave me included searches for items in an online store and even speeding up data cleansing processes.

Search vendors love to harp on about how 70 per cent of the world’s data is unstructured and how important it is to be able to find what you are looking for inside that. But it is less often said that the 30 per cent of structured stuff is pretty business-critical too. Apart from cementing Autonomy’s place as the richest and most successful UK tech firm, this development could offer up some intriguing new applications for the future.

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