Autonomy Gains 'Leader' Position in Gartner Report

By David Sims

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

Keeping you fully abreast of the analyst reports germane to your chosen lifestyle, we can report that Autonomy Corporation plc, a vendor of CRM and other infrastructure software, has announced that industry analyst group Gartner (News - Alert) has positioned Autonomy in the Leaders Quadrant of its 2007 Information Access Technology Magic Quadrant Report.

 

The analysis is based on Autonomy's "Ability to Execute" and "Completeness of Vision."

 

The first half of 2007 "has been the most successful in Autonomy's 11-year history," said Mike Lynch, CEO of Autonomy. Lynch said Autonomy supports "the industry's highest investment in R&D, over $70 million annually."

 

He said he considers that Autonomy's position in the Leaders Quadrant "can be credited to our over 17,000 customers," and by "our dominance in the OEM market through partnerships with independent software vendors."

 

In the report, Gartner recommends that "Global 2000 enterprises at least select a platform vendor for the majority of future projects. Platform vendors offer modular architectures, wide varieties of relevance modeling, multiple vertical applications and significant customizability."

 

The firm is also of the opinion that enterprises "must also recognize the need to explore more specialized products for important and specific projects, such as e-discovery, e-commerce search or research science support."

 

The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner.

 

In early July Autonomy and Zantaz announced that they had entered into a definitive merger agreement for Autonomy to acquire Zantaz for a purchase price of approximately $375 million in cash after certain deductions.

 

In August Autonomy announced that it had been selected as the preferred partner for enterprise search and meaning-based technologies by Aktive Reply, part of the Reply Group.

 

The move is designed to "underpin a new initiative focusing on products for the Italian financial services market," Autonomy officials say. As part of the agreement a products center specifically dedicated to developing these products will be created in Italy.

 

Aktive Reply is an Italian systems integrator and consultancy for information management products, with particular expertise in the areas of knowledge management and enterprise information portals. Autonomy and Aktive Reply have a partnership already in place, and have worked together on several projects in the government, manufacturing and telecommunications spaces.

 

Autonomy will support the development of the new products center by providing access to both Autonomy and Aungate technology, advising on the design and setup of the products center and providing training and ongoing support for Aktive Reply staff.