Autonomy Rescues Firms From Tower Of Babel

The hodgepodge consists of critical information that is increasingly becoming unfathomable. But solution providers working with Autonomy say the technology affords them a strategy to help clients track and retrieve data.

Autonomy's solution "is almost an infrastructure layer that sits between the data repository and the front-end application," said Kevin Bury, vice president of sales at Meritage, a Columbus, Ohio-based solution provider that takes its name from a wine-maker's term for blends of grape varieties.

Autonomy, from a San Francisco-based company that bears the same name, sits atop information buried in portals, databases, Microsoft Word files and any type of back-end storage. It feeds that information to portal servers or content management products.

Bury said Autonomy outpaces products from Inktomi and Verity and ranks in his mind as "best-of-breed for unlocking the power in unstructured data."

Working with Autonomy's direct-sales force, Meritage has won implementation engagements with Blue Cross/Blue Shield and the Society of Petroleum Engineers, Bury said. The value of a deal involving implementation and customization services for a client can range anywhere from $50,000 to four times that, he said.

Autonomy is usually one component of a larger solution for a customer, said Steve Robinson, director of marketing at Meritage.

Todd Price, co-founder and COO of Navigator Systems, an Addison, Texas-based e-business solution provider, said his company discovered Autonomy several years ago when helping a client in the consumer packaged goods space control multiple formats of text data. Navigator evaluated three or four other data management platforms before it found out about Autonomy.

"We brought [Autonomy into the proof-of-concept phase, and we were very pleased with the functionality and how we would integrate it with this particular solution," he said.

In 1999, Navigator signed a formal partnership deal with Autonomy.

Ron Kolb, Autonomy's director of technology strategy, said the company is looking for more solution providers to join the fold.

"Our sales force is highly incented to work through partners," Kolb said, though he would not give specific details about the reps' compensation. "They are constantly on the lookout for quality firms that have the right technical toolkit."

One of Navigator's three clients using Autonomy is VHA, a network of physicians and community-owned health-care systems. Navigator initially considered Lotus Discovery and Verity for the knowledge management project.

Steve Sims, a technology practice leader at Navigator who was also the project manager on the engagement, said VHA had mounds of order forms, manuals, policies and procedures,and was manually classifying data. Autonomy increased links between existing document management and content management systems.

The VHA solution, operational for about a year, contains about 10,000 pieces of data and can scale to hold millions more, Sims said.

Kolb said that some 40 vendors, including Art Technology Group, license Autonomy's technology for use in their own products. Licensing yields about 20 percent of the company's annual sales, he said.

"From a VAR perspective, our business model is selling software," Kolb said. "The services are there for the grabbing."