Tony Hallett's After These Messages: Give me Autonomy

A British software company shaking off its shyness and going big with advertising? It's happening, says Tony Hallett...

Autonomy is these days a fairly well-known UK software maker. Headed by Mike Lynch, a man equally referred to on these pages over the years as an entrepreneur, technologist and business leader, it has gone through its tech bubble spike to settle down as one of the brightest European software players.

So why has it surprised me, not once but twice in the past few weeks? Its advertising has got to me, I admit it.

This week I attended a debate about the future of European software vendors. More precisely, the big question turned out to be whether any would be in the global top 20, five years from now - after all, today we can only count SAP, Dassault Systemes and Sage in that elite group, by market cap.

Indeed the heads of Business Objects, Sage and one of the top three or four execs from SAP were at the debate. Autonomy, presumably Mike Lynch, could have easily shared the same floor.

Much of the talk was about European players competing, punching their weight. So I'm glad I've seen the latest Autonomy advertising.

First of all, a few weeks back I was making the trip from San Francisco airport into the city of the same name. Many of you will know that 30-40 minute journey and the immediate onslaught of offices and billboards visible from the highway, mainly the preserve of tech companies.

It was nice on that particular journey north to see a big 'Autonomy' billboard sitting astride a hilltop. Could this be the same company I visited all those years ago in Cambridge? And it's not even the days of ridiculous advertising, I thought.

Then in the past few days my eye caught a line on a page in The Economist, a typical page of advertising that I was rapidly flicking past. An Oracle ad, thought I. It began, in the tell-tale white on red text: "Databases store 20%."

Then the kicker: "We understand the other 80%.", in the slightly less aggressive font of Autonomy. Do you see what they did there?

Of course we then get a spiel about the Autonomy proposition, and clever it sounds to me, still. OK, so I'm no fan of any line that finishes with the words "…inside any application including CRM, CEM, KM, EIP and BI."

Scrabble, anyone?

But they probably know what they're up to - and recognise who's likely to be reading by that stage.

Coming from a country with no huge software successes (though Sage is now pretty close), we shouldn't get too carried away by a billboard and an ad in a well-known business weekly. To name but a few, IBM, Microsoft and - you guessed it - Oracle are all in that edition. In fact the latter features that classic Oracle red, white and black lettering, as it happens across from a story featuring Bill Gates administering a vaccine to a child in India. But that quite literally is another story.

Will Oracle get upset by the implication of the Autonomy ad? I haven't asked them, mainly because I'd like to think they're better than that - and they can hardly cast those sorts of stones. Just ask the guys over in Walldorf about those 'The world's best run businesses run SAP' ads and the similar fare from Ellison and co.

While we can point to quality of management, the right ecosystem, addressable markets close to home and other factors that help ensure the success of any software or - more broadly - tech vendor, being aggressive is also up there.

It's mild aggression, for now, but I sense increased confidence at Autonomy.