Chief executive Lynch stands to make $1bn from sale of Autonomy to HP

TIPPERARY-BORN founder and chief executive of Autonomy Mike Lynch stands to make up to $1 billion from the sale to HP of the company he set up in 1996.

After moving to England as a child, the British-based entrepreneur went on to study engineering and mathematical computing at Cambridge University. He founded Neurodynamics in 1991, which Autonomy spun out from in 1996.

The company listed in London in 2000, and 45-year-old Lynch holds an 8 per cent stake in the firm.

Autonomy is now Britain’s second-largest software-maker. It specialises in unstructured data – email, phone calls, video – and provides software that automates the analysis of this data, making it more “human friendly”.

With the amount of data growing at a fast pace – IDC estimates it will reach 1.8 zettabytes this year – the ability to quickly search through unstructured data could become increasingly important.

Autonomy already has an impressive list of customers, counting Coca-Cola, the US Securities and Exchange Commission and even the US Department of Homeland Security among them.

Its software can be used for a range of applications, from tracking people suspected of terrorism or fraud, to connecting news and data.

HP obviously sees something of value in it; its price tag of $11.7 billion (€8.2 billion), in an all-cash offer is close to a 79 per cent premium to the company’s closing price on Thursday.

For the tech giant, the purchase is a step away from its PC business, which it plans to spin off and could sell, and further into the software market. It’s a path that has already been taken by IBM, which sold off its PC unit in 2005.

Lynch, along with his special brand of abrasive intellectual charm, comes as part of the package. He will still wake at dawn to speak to customers in Asia and end his day late at night with calls to California, despite netting about $766 million for his 8.2 percent stake.

“He doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but look at his track record,” said one colleague who has known Lynch since the late-1990s.

Deutsche Bank analyst and former employee of Autonomy Marc Geall last year criticised Lynch for running a mature company “like a startup” – with management spread too thin, but for other sector watchers, that trait is to be admired.

“He’s one of a rare breed in the UK to have grown a FTSE 100 software company from scratch,” said Richard Holway of TechMarketView.

Lynch, who built Britain’s largest software firm from beginnings in Cambridge, England in 1996, said it was a “momentous day in Autonomys history”, and selling to HP would provide a platform to bring its technology to a world-leading stage. (– Reuters)