The challenge faced by companies in dealing with a growing deluge of digitally formatted information has prompted Autonomy, the world's biggest search software company, to predict record results.
The upbeat trading update sent shares in Autonomy 19¾p higher at 428½p.
Some analysts ascribed the positive update to a successful integration of Verity, a US rival bought for $500m last December.
But Mike Lynch, founder and chief executive of Autonomy, said the most important factor was an increased need for companies to sort through a growing amount of unstructured data such as e-mails, video and phone calls.
"They're being forced to deal with it because of regulation and compliance," he said. "Our area is growing much faster than the background IT [market]."
Autonomy said second-quarter revenue would be in line with analysts' estimates of $60.7m (£32.8m) and pre-tax profit would be above a consensus of $15.1m.
George O'Connor, an analyst at Shore Capital, said: "This is the sixth consecutive quarter of record results and, in our opinion, Autonomy, post-Verity, has entered a halcyon trading period." He added that Autonomy now had "gorilla status" compared with smaller competitors in its specialist sector.
The Cambridge-based company, which includes IBM, Boeing, the US Army and Britain's Metropolitan Police among its clients, supplies software that conducts searches based on themes. It works with images and videos as well as text.
Google, the market leader in internet-based search, is turning its attention to the enterprise market that Autonomy serves with a hardware device that can search through swathes of companies' data.
But Mr O'Connor said he saw commoditisation of search tools as the key business risk to Autonomy rather than the challenge from Google. Mr Lynchsaid Google's push into the enterprise market "makes almost no difference" as it was offering a lower-end product.
Autonomy is due to post results for the six months to the end of June on July 26.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
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