Intelligent Data Operating Layer

TMCNet is reporting a couple of moves by Autonomy Corporation plc, not the least of which is a multi-million dollar/Euro/pound contract with Her Majesty’s government. Under terms of the contract, Autonomy will deploy its IDOL Server software. (Get it? IDOL Server? Whoa, that’s bad … but memorable! And that’s all that matters in the end.)

IDOL stands for “Intelligent Data Operating Layer,” and serves as a platform for the “conceptual and contextual understanding of information in an enterprise.” Company PR states that IDOL “automatically analyzes any piece of information from 1000 different content formats, including text, voice or video and delivers over 500 functions including hyperlinking, agents, summarization, taxonomy generation, retrieval, channels, clustering, visualization, eduction, profiling, collaboration and alerting.”

The deal for poundage is just the latest bit of news from Autonomy, however, as the firm continues to extend its reach into the great land of China. Forbes’ Pammy Olsen wrote a story entitled “Autonomy Gets The Picture,” in which a few details about Autonomy’s recent deal with Chinese state broadcaster China Central Television. Reportedly, Autonomy bagged exclusive access to sixteen stations’ worth of television content. At the time of the China Central Television signing, OpenV had already reached agreements with Beijing TV, Shanghai Media Group, ZheJiang TV, JiangXi TV, NeiMengGu TV and Hunan TV. To this end, Autonomy will get to work placing “millions of hours of programming” on the OpenV video search service, a website browser which Forbes describes as “busy-looking” and “rather like a Chinese version of YouTube.” (In fact, the Forbes article goes on to say that the recent Google purchase of YouTube may have influenced the Autonomy move.)

OpenV’s service is to be available through internet sites including CCTV.com and SMGBB, reportedly the two largest Chinese TV broadband sites; QQ, the largest Chinese community site; Yahoo! China; Nusports, the largest Chinese sports site; XinHua net, a Chinese news wire service; and China Radio International. Autonomy spokespeople have stated that OpenV currently gets five million page views and one million users per day; WPP, AC Nielsen and Chang Rong (a.k.a. Charm Communication Group) have been subcontracted in the search for advertising dollars.

Last week also saw release of new versions of Aungate Electronic Document Discovery and Real-Time Monitoring solutions for the IDOL platform. Autonomy is pushing the products on the basis of the U.S.’ eDiscovery legislation. Said a company spokesman, “The significant rise in market demand for intelligent, scalable and cost-effective eDiscovery solutions is now being accelerated not just by existing and forthcoming legislation such as the new U.S. Federal Laws of Civil Procedure which take effect on December 1, 2006, but also by an increasing need to overcome the costly effects and risks of disparate information silos that reside within the global enterprise.”

Another news item shows that Autonomy is big in Spain, too. El Mundo, Spain’s largest daily, has selected Autonomy’s meaning-based technology for the online www.elmundo.es. Reportedly, the website just got off a crazy busy month, with ten million unique visitors to the site, a whopping 65 percent increase since January. El Mundo had already licensed Autonomy to index over two million documents for an unlimited number of visitors to their site. Was that “big in Spain?” I meant, “big in Japan.”

As TMCNet reports, “Nomura has selected Autonomy’s IDOL 7 for a multi-lingual deployment to more than 20,000 users. Nomura had experience of legacy keyword technologies which spurred them to search for a next-generation product. CRM vendor Autonomy’s product was chosen following a competitive procurement focusing on scalability and finding a system that spoke Japanese.” Unfortunately, Forbes dropped a bit of rain on the parade of news out of Autonomy this month, as the magazine called the firm “one of the biggest losers on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday [17 October], most likely due to profit taking after a month long climb in the shares of around 25 percent.

Shares dropped 3.2 percent, to US $9.29…” 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. The Autonomy Group includes Aungate, Virage, etalk and Cardiff.