Cambridge, UK and San Francisco, California-based Autonomy Corporation Plc said yesterday it will take the anti-portal approach when it releases its latest knowledge management tool later this year. ActiveWeb is an internet-wide reworking of its ActiveKnowledge software, which searches corporate intranets and selected internet web sites in real-time for information related to whatever document the user is working on. The news came as Autonomy reported second quarter revenues up 237% on the year-ago period.
ActiveKnowledge is used to seek out news, email and internal documents, usually from around 600 sources, but the new software will scan the entire web for related sites as well. ActiveWeb will conduct real-time searches of the internet using Autonomy’s pattern recognition algorithms, which locate the key ideas within documents of unstructured data and match them against documents containing similar themes. Autonomy said its database currently encompasses around 10% of the web, but the idea is to make it exhaustive, though probably not before release.
The business case for such a tool is to maximize worker productivity by automating web surfing to save time. CEO Mike Lynch said ActiveWeb will reduce the need to use web-based search engines and portals. There is no firm roadmap for release yet, as the company is still pondering how best to exploit the technology.
The Easdaq-listed company yesterday reported net income for the second quarter ended June 30 of 293,911 pounds ($475,254) on revenues up 237% on the same period last year at 3.71m pounds ($6m). Gross margins were higher than expected, up 10 percentage points at 92%. Average contract size increased 18% to 104,000 pounds ($168,250), with 92% of all deals over the 50,000 pound ($80,890) mark.
Autonomy has yet to see any noticeable return from the technology OEM business it created in June (CI No 3,687), but once products from its partners begin to hit the market it expects that revenue stream to be significant. Autonomy typically has royalties of between 10% and 30% on OEM products. Lynch views OEMing as a route for the company into additional vertical software markets such as customer relationship management and sales force automation.
