City analysts are tipping Cambridge based search company, Autonomy – Business Weekly’s reigning ‘Business of the Year’ – to be the next Oracle.

Citigroup Global Markets says: “If we take Oracle as a proxy, we estimate Autonomy should be able to grow by 20 per cent-plus for a decade.”

The analyst note was published ahead of today's trading statement that Autonomy's revenues and profitability will be considerably ahead of previous forecasts.

“Enterprises learned a long time ago the value of managing structured data and this led to the growth of the database market and the rise of companies such as Oracle. If as we suspect regulatory change catalyses the market for unstructured data management, the obvious precedent is the structured database market.”

Autonomy still has some way to go to emulate the might of NASDAQ-listed Oracle, which currently has a market cap of $89bn.

Citigroup posts a buy recommendation and estimates that £17.10p ($25) a share is achievable.

It has been impressed by Autonomy’s decision to broaden its senior management structure so that highly-respected group CEO Dr Mike Lynch isn’t the only major decision maker as the business moves forward.

Piper Jaffray also recommended Autonomy as a buy at a more modest £12.25p.

Autonomy says it expects to report full year 2008 revenue and profitability above the model discussed at the company’s Q3 2008 results presentation in October.

Revenues are also expected to be at or above consensus forecasts as of December 31 of $502.3 million (£333.5m), and fully diluted EPS (adjusted) above consensus forecasts of $0.64.

Autonomy's shares rose just over two per cent to 1002p on the news.

Dr Lynch said: “We are very pleased with these firm results, which outperform the company’s expectations despite the turmoil of the general economic environment and the negative effects on revenues of foreign exchange movements in the fourth quarter.”

These results are preliminary and subject to the usual quarterly financial review by Autonomy’s independent auditors.

Autonomy is a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise and is spearheading the meaning-based computing movement.

It was recently ranked by IDC as the clear market share leader in enterprise search with market share nearly double that of its nearest competitor.

Autonomy's technology allows computers to harness the full richness of human information, forming a conceptual and contextual understanding of any piece of electronic data including unstructured information, be it text, email, voice or video.

Autonomy's customer base boasts more than 17,000 global companies and organisations.

Entries for Business Weekly's East of England Business Awards, for which Autonomy won the overall title last year, closed just before Christmas. The judging process runs through to early March before the announcement of the latest crop of winners at the presentation evening on Thursday March 19th.