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TWST: Can we start with a quick introduction and historical overview of Autonomy (London:AUTN.L) (NasdaqNM:AUTN)?

Mr. Lynch: Autonomy was founded in 1996 and is a global software company, with headquarters split between Cambridge, England and San Francisco, US. Similarly, we’re quoted on both the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. Our business is about handling all of the unstructured information in the world: that’s information that’s in a human-friendly form such as email, analyst reports, newspapers, telephone calls, TV broadcasts. The market opportunity is very large because 80 percent of the information in the world is in that human-friendly form rather than in computer databases, yet pretty much all of it gets handled by human beings either actually reading it or listening to it because computers have traditionally been very limited in what they can.

TWST: Are there specific core markets for your capabilities or is this a very broad, diverse potential customer base?

Mr. Lynch: It’s broad because it is a widespread problem. However, we do break our business currently into three distinct divisions. The first one is Commercial, which is Global 2000. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in, if you’re large then you’re having a crisis dealing with information at the moment. The second one is Intelligence. As you can imagine, at the moment our boom area is processing of information from an intelligence point-of-view, pretty much all of which is unstructured. And the last division is OEM, which is where our technology is built inside other people’s software because they need to make their software intelligent enough to handle unstructured information.

TWST: What does the competitive landscape look like at the moment?

Mr. Lynch: The main competition we see is the systems that we’re replacing. These are the legacy systems, which are basically software systems, such as search engines, that were there to help the human being do the task, as opposed to automatic systems which do the task for the user. . But the markets are actually really quite differentiated. If you look at, for example, the average selling price of human-aiding legacy systems, that’s actually been collapsing through the downturn, whereas the automatic systems have actually been bucking the trend and going up. The reason is that the return on investment calculations are very strong because you reduce headcount.

TWST: How would you summarize your overall game plan for the next 12 to 24 months? Can you touch on some of the key objectives you would like to accomplish during that time?

Mr. Lynch: One of the nice things about the business model is its rather different. Unlike most software companies, we don’t do services and we don’t bespoke the software. We make a standard piece of software which is applicable to many customers. A good analogy would be Intel; they make a microprocessor which would be used for many different things, but they just make the one clever bit over and over again. Now, what that means is we have a fixed cost base and then as revenues come in above that we can have quite have quite high operating margins. So we’ve managed to stay profitable for the last 12 consecutive quarters and obviously our goal is to maintain that. In fact, we’ve actually grown our profits through the downturn. So our full year adjusted profits, taking out an F/X effect that used to be in previous years, is actually up 32 percent. We’d like to see that profit growth continue. We’d like to see some revenue growth, obviously at a smaller level unless there is a recovery. In addition, Autonomy is the market share leader in this area and we’d like to see that consolidate, signing up more of those OEM’s for the long term business. The other big advantage we have, which we’d like to see continue, is that our business model has enabled us to increase our R&D very dramatically. Our R&D spend is actually up 41 percent from 2000 and it’s a great time to be doing R&D because there’s excellent people coming on the market who’ve been laid off through no fault of their own and you can snap them up. It’s a really great time to build for the future.