>Sold 100 shares of CRA....
WHY!!!
Btw
Do you remember some time ago I told you about Autonomy?
>SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- Think of Mike Lynch as a special agent.
After all, the founder of Britain's Autonomy Corp. PLC speaks a different language than most of us. It's a language of neural networks, knowledge management and ... well, context.
The 34-year-old Briton's company, which is one of Europe's hottest stocks (AUTN on Brussel's Easdaq), is in a sizzling space right now: chaos.
"The information you shouldn't receive is just as important as the information you do receive," Lynch told me. See my WCBS-TV MarketWatch interview.
The information economy is no breeze. Sales executives get bombarded with leads via e-mail, facsimile and telephone. Mid-level managers plow through memos, Web sites, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.
Customer service representatives plow through requests, complaints, suggestions. "With little or no context," says Lynch.
The doctorate student's earlier company, Neurodynamics Ltd., got its start in Cambridge, England, by sifting through top-secret messages, looking for contextual clues to coded garble. That's what you get from a fellow like Lynch, who used to specialize in pattern-recognition algorithms before he tried his hand at running a publicly traded company.
Lynch, with his John Lennon shades and thin beard, believes in a world of "paperless paper." His Autonomy Corp. licenses software to more than 200 of the world's largest companies, including news organizations such as British Broadcasting Corp., media giants like News Corp. (NWS: news, chart), aerospace developers, even detergent makers.
"There's a big problem with the e-economy," he says. "It's called text. You have the telcos, manufacturing, banking . . . they all have the same problem."
In a world swamped with prose -- much of it boring, or technical or just plain messy -- Global 2000 companies are looking for the great streamliner: a piece of software that cuts to the quick, says Lynch.
In a recent analysis, International Data Corp. researcher Gerry Murray wrote about the pitfalls of unstructured content. If you are sitting at a personal computer connected to the Web and your company's network, you are a victim of unstructured content.
"A key requirement for winning in the digital economy is an intelligent infrastructure to provide, manage and process information," Murray writes. Unstructured content -- that rambling e-mail, the chat-room discourse, a dozen news articles, a customer's angry feedback -- is valuable. But even the best relational database products from Oracle (ORCL: news, chart) or Informix (IFMX: news, chart) won't help you mine the information nuggets that are worth their weight in platinum.
Enterprising, wouldn't you say?
Lynch's software products right now are getting a lot of attention. That's because investors -- and customers -- see them as e-business applications. Dozens of Internet companies are making their mark in the field of knowledge management. Document management and routing companies with names such as Open Market (OMKT: news, chart), Nexor, Sybase (SYBS: news, chart), KnowledgeTrack and Hyperwave are using pieces of Autonomy's technology in their enterprise applications, their electronic publishing tools or their e-mail systems.
At California database developer Sybase, for example, Autonomy's software ranks ideas within a piece of text. Sybase is using Autonomy to tag and link newsfeeds, e-mails, Lotus Notes. And on and on. Sybase will use the technology in an enterprise portal, which is the going name these days for a Web site that serves corporate customers.
The market for enterprise portal tools, says Merrill Lynch in an "Internet Week" report last week cited by Autonomy, will reach $15 billion of sales in two years.
Lynch -- Mike, that is, not Merrill -- is sitting pretty. His company's shares on tiny Easdaq were up 90 percent in the month of January alone. (Easdaq is an exchange that focuses mostly, but not solely, on European companies.) Autonomy's market capitalization has grown to $4.5 billion since the Easdaq listing in July 1998. The initial public offering valued Autonomy at $165 million.
Autonomy Corp.'s shares rose 1,200 percent for all of 1999, making it the second-best Easdaq performer, after ActivCard SA. That's impressive -- given that the company's yearly revenue, while growing smartly, is only in the tens of millions of dollars. In the most recent quarter, revenue rose 174 percent to $7.5 million. Gross profit margins were 85 percent, and the company's operating loss (before taxes) was $400,000.
Lynch says he will seek a Nasdaq listing soon in the United States. Until then, Lynch is looking to build his company's reputation among ordinary folks. So last week, Autonomy unveiled a test-version of a knowledge screener. It's called Kenjin, an application that is powered by the Internet. The free service sits on your desktop computer and conducts real-time analysis of your e-mail, Web browser, Word document, whatever you have up and running. Then it prowls several hundreds of news sources and the entire World Wide Web for related links.
Lynch took me to mad-cow.org for a bit of bovine madness. Kenjin, scanning the document, delivered several links, most of them relevant. Relevant, that is, if you were a European who cared about Mad Cow Disease. You can download Kenjin at autonomy.com. It's worth a look, folks.
"No more URLs," says Lynch, who talked to me in San Francisco. "It's a stripped-down version of what we do."
One sign of Lynch's success just might be the size of Autonomy. The company has fewer than 100 employees. Must mean it's managing knowledge real smartly.
"The goal is to give you very small amounts of information," Lynch says. "Companies have to use their intellectual assets." |
