Irishman Mike Lynch’s software company Autonomy is to buy certain assets of Iron Mountain’s digital division. The move will expand Autonomy’s cloud platform to 25 Petabytes of customer data for 25,000 organisations.
Autonomy was set up by Mike Lynch with a stg£10,000 loan from its parents. Headquartered in Cambridge, UK, the company is a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise.
“Processing customer data in the cloud continues to be a strategic part of Autonomy’s information governance business,” Lynch said.
“We look forward to extending regulatory compliance, legal discovery and analytics to a host of new customers as well as enabling the intelligent collection and processing of non-regulatory data from distributed servers, PCs and especially tens of millions of mobile devices. This will afford the opportunity to bring to these customers the power of IDOL’s meaning-based technology.”
Lynch recently listed among Wired Magazine Europe’s 100 most influential players in digital business.
Predicting the future of data in the cloud
Dr Lynch continued: “In 2007 we correctly predicted the merging of regulatory archiving and search, and we believe we are now seeing the next phase where the convergence of regulatory archiving, back-up and data restoration with operational processing of data in the cloud is coming to pass.
“This acquisition makes Autonomy the cloud platform of choice, processing and understanding 25 petabytes of customer information. IDOL will allow significantly more value, analytical insight and return to be generated for our customers from this cloud platform. This places Autonomy at the centre of the changes in the analytics of unstructured data, processing in the cloud-based platforms and desktop virtualisation,” Dr Lynch said.
Autonomy will pay Iron Mountain US$380m in cash, which will leave the company with a cash balance of US$700m.
The acquisition adds over six petabytes of data under management and more than 6,000 customers to Autonomy’s customer base, bringing Autonomy’s private cloud data to over 25 petabytes and total customer base to over 25,000.
The assets acquired include digital archiving, eDiscovery and online backup and recovery solutions of Iron Mountain Digital, but not the technology escrow service and a medical records archive service and other smaller operations which were recently shut down.
Autonomy will offer Connected, the digital data protection product, to existing Autonomy customers across enterprise server, PC and mobile devices.
The software giant expects go-forward revenues of approximately US$130m to US$140m.
Post acquisition Autonomy expects to achieve cost synergies of approximately US$40m per annum over the first year from completion.
Restructuring costs of approximately $10 million are expected in the two quarters following completion of the acquisition.
