Autonomy for everyone!

Infrastructure software provider Autonomy Corporation plc had a good week this week, with company executives today announcing that Verdasys, a provider business process integrity solutions for information risk management, has signed an OEM agreement with Autonomy to integrate the company’s Extractor, Profiler and IDOL technologies into Digital Guardian, Verdasys’ flagship product.

Verdasys has integrated Autonomy’s the three products into the latest Digital Guardian module, known as Adaptive Content Inspection. The Autonomy products allow Verdasys to extend Digital Guardian’s data protection and business process integrity management capabilities by enabling Verdasys customers to search across over a whopping 250 file formats.

With Autonomy products, Verdasys hopes to provide customers to ability to “train” a system to recognize highly sensitive information, later applying it to Verdasys’ context-based data policies monitoring and controling data security and business process integrity.

Also announced today was the bestowal of an International Information Industry award on Autonomy. Autonomy representatives revealed that their TNA Global Search project undertaken with the UK’s National Archives had won the Best User Experience category at the International Information Industry Awards.

The award “recognises any project or service that has shown outstanding innovation in improving the user experience” and are hosted by Online Information 2006 and Information World Review.

With the award, TNA Global Search was recognized as an essential component of The National Archives’ project to digitize one of the largest collections in the world, ultimately “mak[ing] 1000 years of British history available online.” The Autonomy software provides a unified enterprise platform that can simultaneously query the Archives’ 30 million documents (!) across eleven disparate catalogues and databases.

Finally, perhaps least surprising but still most impressive, Autonomy earned a spot for the fourth year running in the “EContent 100.” EContent publishes the list annually, bantering it out among judges to describe the “the stand-out companies that demonstrate the winning strategies and solutions which define the digital content industry.”

In selecting Autonomy for the 2006 EContent 100, the panel of judges noted the company’s leading market share, thought- and technology-leadership, as well as innovation. EContent editor Michelle stated that "Autonomy, like the others on this year’s list, is a company that is having a significant impact on the quality, breadth and depth of our industry."

The entire list, “another fine list that represents the evolution of our industry, from one that began its sheltered life in the ivory towers of the academy to one that today finds itself pulsing through every corner of the wide world and, of course, the web,” can be read on the EContent website.

Verdasys is headquartered in Waltham, Mass., and its flagship product is Digital Guardian. Verdasys specializes in “Business Process Integrity,” with which the company seeks to serve and protect, i.e. “protect information, applications and processes essential to maintaining the market value, proprietary assets, intellectual property, [the] reputation and process integrity of a global enterprise.” Among Digital Guardian platform clientele are those in government agencies, and financial, pharmaceutical, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, and entertainment industries.

The National Archives is a British government department and an executive agency under the secretary of state for constitutional affairs. The archives employ over 600 in offices in Kew, Norwich, central London and Islington. The National Archives seeks to open up and encouraging the reuse of public sector information. As the UK government’s official archive, this mighty institution boasts mementos from 900 years of history from Domesday Book to the present; records ranging from parchment and paper scrolls through to recently created digital files and archived websites. Nice.

About EContent, this says so much: “EContent is dedicated to one of the most essential commodities any business has to offer – content.” Well put. The Wilton, Ct.-based online publication is a division of Information Today Inc. Its continuing mission: to clearly identify and explain emerging digital content trends; to report on and analyze strategies that will help readers navigate the content maze; and to boldly find “a clear path to profits and improved business processes.”

Autonomy’s customer base now numbers over 16,000 global companies and organizations including BAE Systems, Boeing, Ford, Daimler Chrysler, Shell, AOL, BBC, Reuters, Hutchison 3G, Ericsson, T-Mobile, Philips, Coca Cola, Kraft Foods, Nestle, Lloyds TSB, GlaxoSmithKline, KPMG, Citigroup, ABN AMRO, Deutsche Bank, Hewlett Packard, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the New York Stock Exchange, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy. Autonomy has over 300 OEM partners and more than 350 VARs and Integrators, numbering among them leading companies such as BEA, Citrix, EDS, EMC, IBM Global Services, Novell, Symantec, Vignette, Tibco, Stellent and Sybase.