Autonomy Corp Plc, the UK software developer now headquartered in San Francisco, reported a first-quarter net loss of 169,498 pounds ($274,283) up from the loss last time of 520,570 pounds ($857,267) on revenue up 231% at 2.5m pounds ($4.05m). Losses per share improved to 0.4 pence ($0.07) from 1.8 pence ($0.03) last time. Autonomy’s flagship product, KnowledgeServer, uses pattern recognition algorithms to organize and filter enterprise data from disparate sources such as databases, enterprise applications or the web. It stems from technology developed by researchers at the UK’s Cambridge University during the early 90s.
Autonomy’s founder and director, Mike Lynch, based his development effort on the probability theories of 17th century cleric, Thomas Bayes and the more recent information theory of Claude Shannon, a French scientist of the 1950s. Using the theories of these two men, Autonomy claims to changing the paradigm of employing teams of people to organize knowledge and using the limited functionality of key word searching to query data. With KnowledgeServer components, users can ask natural language questions which the software will then interpret and respond to, says Dominic Johnson, Autonomy’s manager. The software will also automatically read documents and offer data links to users as they work, he said.
Autonomy says it has signed a number of new deals with the likes of the Boston Herald in the US and the BBC in the UK. The company also inked a direct sales deal with the Pentagon. Having developed its operations in the US and Europe over the last year, the company now employs over 100 people, a third of whom are developers, and plans to take its technology to the far-eastern markets in the coming year. Johnson says the company is engaged in talks with a Japanese multinational with which it plans to partner and set up operations in Tokyo. KnowledgeServer is aimed at large enterprises and is sold on a per seat license starting at around $100,000 for up to one hundred seats. The medium-sized enterprise version starts at $50,000 for one hundred seats.
