Peggy Salz-Trautman finds software that helps deal with information overload

By PEGGY SALZ-TRAUTMAN

new law is in force thanks to the explosive growth of the Internet: the easier data is to create, the harder it is to find and use. Gone are the days when information could be organized and neatly stored in databases. Today data comes in many shapes from a wide variety of sources--everything from e-mail to chat rooms to online archives. The sheer volume of data, more than 30 million pages on the Web alone, means that a search engine sifting through it often returns more misses than hits. But according to another law of the Internet, as soon as a problem appears, some young entrepreneur solves it.

The current search engines skip relevant information because they look for key words instead of concepts, but Autonomy, a privately held British company, has created software that can deliver data according to individual needs. Ironically, the cutting-edge approach to knowledge management is based on the theories of Thomas Bayes, an 18th century English Presbyterian minister who tinkered with theories of mathematical probability.

By adding the power of the computer to Bayes' concepts, Mike Lynch, 33, Autonomy's founder and CEO, has come up with a way to calculate the relationships between variables quickly and efficiently. "We have gotten the computer to understand prose," Lynch says. "It's a breakthrough--a bit like the transition between vinyl records and the CD. These new technologies are really a watershed in the ability of computers to automate the handling of information."

In 1991 Lynch, who developed the intelligent pattern recognition technology in 1990 when he was a researcher at Cambridge University, established his first company, Neurodynamics, with a $3,200 loan from a local eccentric with a reputation on the London Soho scene for discovering new pop acts. At first the company made money by creating software that could match fingerprints, read license plates and decipher handwriting. Not surprisingly, his main customers were defense contractors and his work was highly classified. Many of Lynch's colleagues left Cambridge to work for defense contractors like Racal. "I couldn't bear the thought of working for such stuffy companies because of the lack of commercial opportunity," says Lynch. Instead, he started his own firm to sell the technology directly to government agencies. "There were no Men in Black," jokes Lynch. "Instead there were men drowning under paper. They realized the value of the technology to help sift through the masses of information contained in super computers, agency reports and witness statements." The Autonomy technology is also used in worldwide security systems--ranging from fingerprint recognition tools employed by the Jordanian government to British Telecom intelligence surveillance systems.

At the request of a key client, Neurodynamics shifted its focus to software that sorts through huge volumes of documents in different languages or in code. The solution was a software capable of understanding the main idea in a text and then finding similar documents by analyzing patterns of symbols. The same technology is at the heart of the British police force's Holmes2 system, named after the legendary detective. Lynch designed the system with U.S. computer company Unisys, which supplied the hardware and infrastructure. Designed to government specifications, the system helps police solve crimes by finding similarities and connections in witness statements or police reports.

Encouraged by such successes, Lynch took the technology to the commercial market in 1996. His new target was companies managing vast amounts of information--on intranets or on the Internet. Since founding the spin-off Autonomy, Lynch has raised $15 million from venture capital firms. Today the company has some 60 large customers worldwide, including Shell International, British Telecom, Macmillan, Associated Press and News Corp.

The software saves time and cuts costs because it automatically categorizes, cross-references, hyperlinks and creates personalized information. More important, Autonomy's technology is the only one on the market so far that leverages the knowledge base of individual employees. To do this it uses a profiling system that automatically identifies an employee's area of expertise based on the issues he researches on the intranet and the ideas in the documents and e-mails he exchanges. "We've designed our products to make it easy for employees to find not only relevant documents...but the contact information of colleagues with the right expertise as well," Lynch says. "After all, to gain and maintain competitive advantage, you need to know whose brains are worth picking, whether they are in the office next door or thousands of miles away." That edge will make Autonomy a force to be reckoned with for some time to come.