Is Autonomy a Microsoft target at north of £6 billion?
Talk is swirling around the largest listed company in the Cambridge cluster of high tech companies, Autonomy Corporation plc, that it is an imminent target of a takeover offer from Microsoft.
Talk in financial markets, (reported here by Reuters), is that the Seattle giant may make a bid at around 2,800p a share, which would value Autonomy at about £6.7 billion, about 75% above its current share price of 1513p and market capitalisation of £3.9 billion.
Autonomy's share price has been up between 3.5% and 5% in Friday morning trading.
While there would be some sadness associated with another Cambridge success story being subsumed in a global giant, a bid of the magnitude suggested would be a significant feather in the cap of the region and the innovative work commercialised in Silicon Fen.
Microsoft has a significant research facility in Cambridge in the University's West Cambridge Campus (in the William Gates Building), so it seems likely that should the rumours be true and any offer be successful, an Autonomy division of Microsoft will retain a substantial presence in Cambridge.
Autonomy has had a phenomenal run, driven since inception by University of Cambridge alumnus and CEO Mike Lynch. He developed the advanced pattern recognition technology that fuels Autonomy's software, based on probabilistic modelling and digital signal processing technologies.
Autonomy now legitimately claims to be a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise. Its technology powers applications dependent upon unstructured information including call centre, customer relationship management, knowledge management, enterprise portals, enterprise resource planning, online publishing and security applications.
Autonomy has a customer base of more than 17,000 firms, including a who's who globally recognised companies and organizations, such as BAE Systems, Ford, Ericsson, Royal Sun Alliance, Sun Microsystems and public sector agencies the US Department of Defense, NASA and the US Department of Energy. Strategic reseller and OEM partners include leading companies such as ATG, BEA, Business Objects, Brio, Citrix, Computer Associates, EDS, IBM Global Services, iManage, Novell, Novient, Vignette and Sybase.
