Irish Entrepreneur Set to Make Over $900m Following Software Sale to Hewlett-Packard
Mike Lynch, the co-founder and CEO of Autonomy Corporation, is set to pocket over $900 million following the sale of his software company to US giants Hewlett-Packard.
Autonomy Corporation, a company that Lynch built from the ground up, is now regarded as the most successful and largest software company in the UK. The Autonomy software allows for data to be tracked across different sources such as; video, phone calls and emails.
Lynch’s entrepreneurship is associated with Silicon Fen, a region affiliated with Cambridge University in England, which is home to a number of high-tech businesses directly related to biotechnology, electronics and software.
The Sunday times once described Lynch as a favourable comparison to Bill Gates, while the Financial Times described Autonomy as ‘the doyen of European software’.
Born in County Tipperary in the Republic of Ireland, Lynch studied at Cambridge University, and is now a leader in the area of meaning-based computing, i.e. computer understanding of unstructured information.
The terms of his sale to HP, will see Lynch remain in his position of running the business, who has come under criticism for his sale of the company to a big name like Hewlett-Packard. However, Lynch has defended the sale of his company, stating that the deal allows the Autonomy technology to reach more people worldwide.
‘I want to get our technology everywhere, and this deal gives us the resources to do that. It moves our sales force from 300 to 28,000 people. This is a good UK story of a small company that now operates globally’, states Lynch.
Lynch believes that Autonomy and Hewlett-Packard can help each other in the creation of new technology. The Irishman stated; ‘Autonomy will be at the cornerstone of Hewlett-Packard’s drive for new technology, and that was key for me. We wanted to be an autonomous unit.’
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati