Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

The  company’s £186m July swoop for the Californian data archival suite provider, Zantaz, now looks a piece of inspired crystal-gazing by the company.

Zantaz creates archives of electronic material for big banks and law firms so that it is available for investigation if the organisation is hit with a lawsuit.

It also makes software that organises telephone calls, faxes, emails and other unstructured data into a standard electronic format that can be easily searched.

Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch said: “Sadly it’s likely to be the case that there will be lots of litigation in the US around sub-prime and we have already seen a large number of large financial institutions who have turned to us to help them.”

He said that the integration of Zantaz was almost complete.

Autonomy also announced the £20m acquisition of Belfast-based Electronic Document and Records Management (EDRM) specialist, Meridio, discreetly described by Lynch as “technology infill.”

It will give Autonomy access to Meridio’s UK MoD and US DoD-approved software, along with its security cleared sales and engineering staff.

Analysts predict Autonomy’s latest buy will boost its already extensive penetration into the huge, high-margin defence and intelligence sector in the US and complete the company’s information management solution for large financial and other institutions.

Autonomy announced that adjusted pre-tax profit for the three months months to September had risen 57 per cent, up to £12.6m from £8m last year, on the back of a £15m rise in revenues to £45m.

The boost in revenues, which was broadly in line with analysts’ forecasts, came as a result of contracts with blue-chip companies such as Oracle, Royal Dutch Shell and News Corporation, and from new acquisitions, it said.

“These results are in line with consensus revenue and profit estimates, despite the third quarter seasonally being our quietest quarter and the considerable amount of work involved in integrating the ZANTAZ acquisition,”  Lynch said in a statement.

Autonomy said the Meridio  acquisition would be satisfied by the issue of 1.33m shares and the balance in cash.

It added that dependent on the timing of the deal’s completion, the purchase of the document and records management software maker would have little or no impact on this year’s fourth quarter results.
Autonomy’s success has been noted with its award of a place in the top 500 “growth champions in Europe” by Entrepreneurs for Growth.

Autonomy ranked 85th in the table, which is scored by measuring both relative and absolute growth.

“As the global leader in our software sector, we have experienced over 30 consecutive quarters of growth and Europe’s 500 Listing serves as further validation of our economic impact in the European business community,” said Lynch.

“We have increased our employee base over 430 per cent during the past three years alone, primarily in sales and research & development, in order to service the explosive demand from customers who are rapidly moving to standardising on our platform for all their information processing needs.”