Management Toolkit

Getting back to basics

Tags:
Autonomy

Andrew Donoghue ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 08 Oct 2003 16:55 BST

So you've ridden the stock-market roller coaster through ups and downs -- are you seeing any sign of a recovery in tech spending?
The situation we are seeing in Q4 is that there's definitely a recovery in activity levels. But what you don't know is, is that robust or fragile? As soon as we get a bad bit of economic news will everyone crawl back in their shells?

We've been very fortunate on the stock-market roller-coaster. We have been profitable all the way through it and have plenty of cash - so we don't actually need it. But if you're company was loss-making and you had to raise money on the stock-market. It would have been a nightmare. The main thing is just head-down and carry on and it all sort's itself out in the end. It's actually quite a nice environment at the moment. In bubble days everything was so crazy. We had something like 40 companies that at some point said in their marketing they were like Autonomy and they've all gone out of business now.

The next big IPO everyone is waiting for is Google -- do you think they've been right to be cautious about going public?
Google has been very fortunate in being private through the downturn and I think they are quite wise to this and have tried to hang it out to the last minute but I think there are all sorts of reasons why they might have to go public very soon.

Increasing competition is probably one of those reasons. Microsoft has publicly voiced its intentions to get into search in a big way with Longhorn -- the next version of Windows.
Search is a very small part of our business. The only thing I would say is that having been in the industry, I have seen Lotus and Oracle and Microsoft announce initiatives in non-structured data for the last 12 years and the announcement seems to carry more weight than what arrives.