Autonomy

Michael Lynch and Richard Gaunt, based on a division of Cambridge Neurodymaics that worked on fingerprint recognition software , founded Autonomy in 1996 . (In 2005, Cambridge Neurodynamics was completely bought out by the founders and became part of Autonomy.) The main solution of the company was initially connecting software that provides customizable content categorization mechanisms based on the allocation of semantic units ( English meaning based computing ) and pattern recognition .

In 1998, the company held an initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange , until the abolition of its shares were traded with the ticker AU . Over the next two years, the company's market capitalization grew 100 times, exceeding at the peak of the dot-com boom $ 10 billion and making Lynch a dollar billionaire ^[3] .

Since the mid-2000s, the company has focused on extensive growth through acquisitions, both by competitors and developers of related solutions as part of a strategy to expand the product portfolio. So, in December 2005, the company acquired the main competitor in the market for search in unstructured data of that time - the American company Verty for $ 0.5 billion ^[4] , in May 2007 - the British company Blinkx , specializing in search in video and audio content for $ 0.25 billion ^[5] , in July 2007 - the company Zantaz, which provides email archiving services and legal support for digital law for $ 375 ^[6] , in October 2007 - the Northern Ireland Meridio, developing a replicated application for managing records , and in january 2 009 - the company developing the Interwoven ECM system for $ 0.775 billion ^[7] . In June 2010, a unit was purchased from CA Technologies Corporation that was engaged in the development of a replicable system for integrated management of organizational information, the parameters of the transaction were not disclosed ^[8] . In May 2011, Iron Mountain Digital was acquired, providing digital intelligence and backup services for $ 0.38 billion ^[9] .

On August 18, 2011, Hewlett-Packard Corporation announced an agreement with Autonomy on its takeover for $ 10.2 billion (with an estimated value of 79% higher than market capitalization). On October 3, 2011, the deal was closed; Hewlett-Packard received 87% of the company’s shares ^[10] .

Less than a month after the takeover agreement, Hewlett-Packard was replaced by the CEO - instead of Leo Apotheker ( German Léo Apotheker ), Meg Whitman took the post, who noted significant difficulties in scaling the inherited Autonomy business ^[11] , and the results of sales of licenses for Autonomy products in the II quarter of the fiscal year (ending in April 2012) was called "very disappointing" ^[12] . In May 2012, about 250 former Autonomy employees, including Michael Lynch, were dismissed from the corporation ^[12] , in November of the same year, the corporation wrote off about $ 8.8 billion of the assets of the acquired company, incidentally accusing the former Autonomy management of intentionally overstating financial indicators ^{[13] ]} . From Lynch’s point of view, the difference in the assessment of financial results was caused by differences between the British accounting standards of IFRS and the American GAAP , and by no means the fraudulent intentions of Autonomy management, Lynch also referred to the authority of Deloitte's auditors quarterly checking his company's reports ^[14] .

In 2015, Hewlett-Packard filed a lawsuit in a London court against Lynch and Sushovan Hussein (the former chief financial officer of Autonomy), demanding from them $ 5.1 billion compensation for intentional distortions in the financial statements ^[14] (subsequently, the trial was postponed until 2018 ^{[15] ]} ). After the Hewlett-Packard section in 2015, Autonomy's assets were transferred to HPE and soon sold to the British company along with a large package of software development business (including the entire OpenView line, IT management software, development management systems software), the transaction amount for the entire package is estimated at $ 8.8 billion ^[16] . In 2018, Hussein was sentenced by a British court to 12 years in prison, and subsequently his sentence was reduced ^[17] .

IDOL ( Intelligent Data Operating Layer ) is a middleware package that was considered the main product of the company ^[18] . The package includes many functions for processing unstructured data, such as automatic selection of entities (including those that support machine learning with a teacher ), conceptual data analysis (identifying relationships between data in different systems), visualization of data arrays, cluster analysis , automatic generation taxonomies. The developers opposed the package to systems of the Business Intelligence class, which process exclusively structured information.

The company sponsored the Mercedes GP team of Formula 1 sports racing with a total budget of $ 8 million and the football team of the English Premier League Tottenham Hotspur (since 2010) ^[19] .

• Siberman, Steve The Quest for Meaning . Wired . - The world's smartest search engine took 250 years to build. Autonomy is here. Date of treatment December 10, 2011. Archived on May 17, 2012.
• Lynch, Michael Meaning-based Computing (Podcast). Warton Business School. - Autonomy's Michael Lynch on Meaning-based Computing. Date of treatment December 10, 2011. Archived on May 17, 2012.