CRM Vendor Autonomy Wins Large British Government Contract

Autonomy Corporation plc, a vendor of CRM and other infrastructure software for the enterprise, has announced a multi-million pound contract with the U.K. Government to deploy Autonomy IDOL Server software.

Autonomy has collaborated in the past with government, defense and intelligence agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, NASA, the U.S. Air Force, the U.K. Audit Commission and the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry.

Autonomy's agreement with the U.K. Government is based on software license, professional services and maintenance fees.

Autonomy's technology, in company-generated words this reporter admires for their sheer lyrical poetry, "forms a conceptual and contextual understanding of any piece of electronic data including unstructured information, be it text, e-mail, voice or video."

According to a recent Forbes report, Autonomy has signed a deal with China's state broadcaster, China Central Television "to get exclusive access to its television content." Forbes says the deal means  "Internet users in China will be able to access millions of hours of programming via Autonomy's 40 percent-owned OpenV video search service."

China Central Television and "a number of other Chinese companies" own the rest of the service, "which lets users to trawl through vast catalogues of TV programs and music videos," the journal explains.

Forbes calls the "busy-looking OpenV Web site" a Chinese version of YouTube, which "is said by Autonomy to serve one million users per day. Naturally, Autonomy intends to make money from advertisers and is already working with WPP and AC Nielsen on this front."

However, "neither OpenV norYouTube have yet to earn much hard cash, and analysts were duly skeptical about the joint venture, saying that its revenue potential was difficult to predict."

In early September Autonomy announced that 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.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.

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