Autonomy announced today that Logical, the e-business integration and services division of JSE-listed Datatec Limited, has purchased Autonomy`s technology to enable its employees in 10 countries around the world to have personalised business information automatically delivered to them, whether they are in the office or on the move, through a corporate portal, mobile phones and PDAs.
Autonomy`s Portal-in-a-Box, Active Knowledge and i-WAP products will profile users automatically, based on the concepts contained in the digital documents and pages they read and produce, and deliver only the most pertinent information to them. The information will be taken from multiple sources, including newsfeeds, Web pages, intranet pages, databases and office documents stored on the company`s network and e-mails.
Users will no longer have to search for relevant professional information; rather, it will be sent to them automatically, with no manual effort involved. In addition, the software enables users with similar interests to be identified, and put in touch with each other, so that unnecessary duplication of effort is avoided and the valuable knowledge `locked` in employees` heads can be effectively exploited.
Mark McCluskey, Chief Knowledge Officer of Logical Worldwide, said: "To serve our customers successfully we need two things: we need to know where in the organisation the experience and capability exists for a particular task yet we also have to make sure everybody has the right information at the right time. Autonomy makes this entire process automatic so there`s no costly manual intervention needed on our part. This technology also supports our strategy for rapid growth by accelerating the process of connecting relevant people to information as we move into new markets."
Dr. Mike Lynch, Founder and Group CEO of Autonomy, said: "Companies need to be able to process information in a personalised and timely way, but they can`t afford to employ teams of people to manually tag up that information and then decide where it should go and who should read it. Autonomy makes this whole process automatic. It ensures that everybody is kept fully informed, all the time, even on the move. There are no manual processing costs, and users are not bombarded with irrelevant information."
At the heart of Autonomy`s software is a pattern recognition technology, which has the ability to analyse a piece of text and identify the main ideas. This enables the software to then determine how the text should be categorised, who should see it, what other relevant material it should be linked to, and how it should be tagged - which all happens automatically. Autonomy`s technology is currently being used or licensed by a number of other high-profile electronic publishers, e-commerce providers, corporates and partners worldwide (see boilerplate).
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Logical
Logical, the e-business solutions and services business of the Datatec Group, is represented in a growing list of countries and continents, including the UK, continental Europe, USA, South Africa and Australia. Positioned at the forefront of complete e-business systems integration, the company has the proven ability to integrate e-business systems from departmental business applications through to entire information infrastructures; from consultancy through systems and network design to implementation, on-going support and facilities management. Logical is one of the few integrators capable of delivering the full range of best-of-breed components for today`s e-business systems, and of exploiting these to create business advantage for customers. Logical is headquartered in Slough, UK, with offices worldwide and employs 2300 people.
Autonomy
Autonomy`s technology powers large-scale, personalised systems to support the infrastructure of the Internet economy, across areas including knowledge management, enterprise portals, new media publishing and electronic commerce applications. Because of its ability to analyse any piece of text (independent of the document`s language) and identify and rank the main ideas therein, Autonomy can automate a broad range of labour-intensive tasks. These range from categorising information by subject matter, to inserting hypertext links to related material, to profiling users based on the ideas in the text they read or write, to delivering information to those most likely to be interested.
Autonomy was founded in 1996 and has offices in San Francisco, New York, Atlanta and Boston, in the United States as well as in Cambridge (England), Paris, Oslo, Stockholm, Sydney, Frankfurt, Munich, Milan, Brussels and Amsterdam. Among its 200 customers are Alcatel, Associated Press, British Aerospace, News Corp., Tesco, Burda, Eli Lilly, Elsevier, Lucent Technologies, Merrill Lynch, TF1, BBC, Reuters, The Royal Mail, the US Army, the US Navy and NASA. In addition, many software companies are licensing Autonomy`s technology to add intelligence to their own products, in areas as diverse as online publishing, knowledge management, email routing, and document management. These include including Vignette, Hewlett-Packard, Brio, Sybase, OpenMarket, Intranet Solutions, Intraspect, Insight and Nexor. Autonomy also has collaborative partnership agreements with worldwide corporations including Compaq, Sun Microsystems and Intel.
In July 1998, the company went public on the EASDAQ exchange (EASDAQ: AUTN). It floated on NASDAQ (NASDAQ: AUTN) in May 2000