Victor, I'm still going to stick to my Autonomy (autn) even though its been whacked too.
When and if the techs do turnaround put it on your buy list.
Don't buy it yet. Goldman just took in 8.3 million shares from Apax the original VC who funded it.
>In this week's StockWatch, Thom Calandra challenges the skeptics now trashing Autonomy PLC (AUTN: news, msgs, alerts) .
THOM CALANDRA (editor-in-chief, CBS and FT MarketWatch.com): There must be easier ways to make a billion bucks. Michael Lynch is the software developer whose British company Autonomy put him in the big leagues.
But the software genius these days finds himself butting heads with London stock analysts. Autonomy makes algorithmic software. It explores mounds of words and data on your desktop, and whips it into shape for large companies.
This field of content management has made Autonomy stock one of the brightest stars, on Nasdaq and the London Stock Exchange. Mike Lynch tells me his company's doing 96 percent profit margins. But the stock is taking a hit after some London analysts question how solidly Autonomy is growing.
One report said a Microsoft (MSFT: news, msgs, alerts) product in development could hurt the company. Another complained Autonomy wasn't signing up enough big name third parties to use its software. Hey, it's tough being a $3 billion tech stock these days.
Mike Lynch is not taking this lying down. The CEO complained to the London Stock Exchange about one false report. He says he has more than 40 third-party users of Autonomy software, including Sybase (SYBS: news, msgs, alerts) and Vignette (VIGN: news, msgs, alerts) . He's confident more big customers will become resellers of his products.
The biggest potential clients are database companies, like Oracle (ORCL: news, msgs, alerts) , PeopleSoft (PSFT: news, msgs, alerts) , and SAP (SAP: news, msgs, alerts) in Germany. If one of those names hooks up to Autonomy, Lynch's critics will look like dunces instead of frustrated geniuses.
In London, waiting for his first billion dollars, this is Thom Calandra at CBS MarketWatch.
McGINNIS: All right, thank you, Thom. Autonomy stock has lost about 60 percent of its value since hitting a high of 63 at the end of August.
>CAMBRIDGE, England, Feb 27, 2001 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Autonomy (Nasdaq: AUTN chart, msgs; Easdaq: AUTN; London:AU.), a leading provider of infrastructure software for the Web and the enterprise, today announced a series of new customer wins in the banking and finance sector, including Lloyds TSB, Lehman Brothers, DG Bank AG, Landeszentralbank Bayern (LZB) and the Zurcher Kantonalbank (ZKB).
These wins bring to 13 the total number of banking, finance and insurance customers announced over the past five months; others include ABN Amro, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, HSBC, Lloyd's of London, Royal & SunAlliance, Fireman's Fund, Nomura and Zurich Financial Group.
-- Lloyds TSB - Lloyds TSB has selected Autonomy to create an automated
information infrastructure to help increase efficiencies across the
entire organization. Lloyds TSB will use Autonomy to automatically
make sense of vast volumes of information including office documents,
PDFs, Web pages and intranet content.
-- Lehman Brothers - Lehman Brothers, a global institutional investment
bank, has selected Autonomy's Portal-in-a-Box(TM) technology to bring
the benefits of automation to the information holdings in its Strategic
IT department.
-- DG Bank AG - DG Bank, a leading German player in retail and business
banking, has deployed Autonomy's Portal-in-a-Box(TM) technology to
automatically manage large volumes of information relating to banking
practice and regulations, in order to make these resources more
transparent to employees. The implementation at DG Bank was carried
out by German banking services specialist BIK, in turn a customer of
Autonomy's German partner SEC Consulting.
-- Landeszentralbank Bayern (LZB) - LZB, a Bavarian division of the German
Bundesbank, has selected Autonomy's Portal-in-a-Box(TM) and Active
Knowledge(TM) technologies to automatically aggregate, categorize,
hypertext link, personalize and deliver business information, in both
English and German, initially to over 150 users. The information will
be drawn from multiple sources, including office documents, intranet
content, the Web, newsfeeds and Lotus notes databases.
-- Zurcher Kantonalbank (ZKB) - ZKB, Switzerland's third-largest bank, has
selected Autonomy for an enterprise implementation that delivers
automatically hypertext-linked information to employees to keep them
fully informed of both internal information and industry-related
issues.
Dr. Mike Lynch, founder and Group CEO of Autonomy, commented: "Regardless of industry sector, companies must face the fact that the amount of unstructured information in the enterprise is doubling every ninety days. Companies cannot afford to neglect their core business while manually managing this information. We provide a fundamental infrastructure technology that can be used in any industry to help enterprises automatically manage and leverage information. The banking industry is yet another vertical market that recognizes the strength of our technology and the efficiency it promotes."
At the heart of Autonomy's software is its ability to analyze text and voice (in any language) and identify and rank the main concepts within it. It can then automatically categorize, link, personalize and deliver that information. The technology is used to automate these operations within enterprise information portals, customer relationship management, knowledge management and e-business applications. |
