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Autonomy’s growth has continued since then: in its third quarter of this year, announced in September, it posted sales of $127.1m, up 42%.

The great irony in all of this is that Lynch does not want Autonomy to be pigeon-holed as an enterprise search company.

IDC’s Feldman though says that, “At this point, it is clear that Autonomy should no longer be considered purely a search vendor. It builds search-based applications to answer market demands for better information-centric software.”

What does that mean? Autonomy’s website explains: “Autonomy's software powers the full spectrum of mission-critical enterprise applications including pan-enterprise search, proactive information risk management, information governance, e-discovery, consolidated archiving, call centre solutions, rich media management, security applications, customer relationship management (CRM), knowledge management (KM) and BPM [business process management].”

Lynch says Autonomy now has in the region of 500 OEM customers, writing applications that embed Autonomy’s Meaning-based Computing, or MBC. Their own software products rely on Autonomy’s pattern matching algorithms to extract ‘meaning’ from unstructured information.

One of the differentiators over its smaller rivals in the space – including Endeca, IBM (smaller in terms of search, at least), Google Enterprise, Simplexo, Sinequa, Recommind and many more – is the list of supported file types that can be handled by Autonomy’s IDOL platform. “By supporting more than 1,000 different data formats, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, located across 400 different content repositories, Autonomy can search all categories of information repositories in an organization,” the company says.