ECONOMICS

Autonomy Corporation plc, a leading provider of infrastructure software for the enterprise, today announced an OEM agreement with VERITAS, Inc., the leading storage software provider. VERITAS Software has embedded Autonomy's technology into the new VERITAS Data Lifecycle Manager 5.0 software. VERITAS Software offers utility computing solutions to address today's challenges in data-intensive business environments for more than 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Announced earlier this week, the new VERITAS Data Lifecycle Manager 5.0 extends data protection to address emerging compliance and litigation requirements. Autonomy's advanced pattern-recognition software enables VERITAS customers to perform advanced concept-based retrieval on e-mails and attachments in more than 300 formats, including Word, Excel, PDF and HTML files. Based on a conceptual understanding, rather than a simple key-word match, Autonomy delivers highly relevant results. Because Autonomy's technology recognizes patterns of words over time, it learns the meanings of new word clusters or acronyms automatically. This is particularly useful in e-mail, where people tend to write in a less formal manner and may use slang or acronyms. "Autonomy enables our customers to manage and organize their data throughout its life cycle," said Bob Maness, senior director, product marketing, VERITAS Software. "With Autonomy's embedded technology, our customers can efficiently oversee, discover and retrieve relevant information from large volumes of files and messages based on natural language search and pattern matching." Eighty percent of the data enterprises use and must be able to access for compliance requirements is unstructured information, such as e-mails, documents, presentations and brochures. With Autonomy's software, the process of aggregating, categorizing and delivering unstructured information to the right person is automatic. Autonomy eliminates the need to have employees manually read through thousands of e-mails or documents to find the information they need. Autonomy's unique Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) integrates unstructured, semi-structured and structured information from multiple repositories through an understanding of their content. Autonomy grants enterprises the flexibility to use advanced information retrieval or legacy-based approaches. At the heart of Autonomy's software is its ability to process text, voice and video, and identify and rank the main concepts within them. It then automatically categorizes, links, summarizes, personalizes and delivers that information. Autonomy's technology also drives collaboration across the enterprise and enables organizations to effectively leverage expertise. Autonomy's infrastructure technology is used to automate operations within enterprise information portals, customer relationship management, knowledge management, business intelligence and e-business applications, among others. "Autonomy's infrastructure technology is used within a variety of software applications, including portals, business intelligence, customer relationship management, product life cycle management, and now data protection and storage," said Stouffer Egan, CEO of North American operations, Autonomy. "We are pleased to further expand our OEM program with industry-leading storage software provider, VERITAS, and to have our technology within their new Data Lifecycle Manager software."