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Autonomy Launches Portal-In-A-Box™ Eliminates Need For Costly Manual Labor In Creating And Maintaining Portal Sites

San Francisco, Calif. (February 1, 1999) - Autonomy, Inc. today announced its new Portal-In-A-Box™ software, which eliminates the need for costly manual labor in the creation and maintenance of portal sites. Portal-In-A-Box™ features everything that is required to automatically create and maintain an easy-to-navigate portal with well-organized information from hundreds of sources and advanced personalization features. Portal-In-A-Box™ is for anyone who wants to create a portal site, from online publishers creating vertical industry portals to intranet developers putting together corporate portals that offer employees the best of the Web and the company's Intranet.

According to Autonomy CEO Dr. Michael Lynch, Portal-In-A-Box™ offers Internet and Intranet developers the ability to easily create and maintain information-rich portals with content drawn from an unlimited number of specified external and internal sources including, websites, news feeds, word processing files, email messages, Excel files, Lotus Notes archives and PowerPoint presentations. "This is the ultimate tool for automating the creation of customized portals," said Lynch, "We have eliminated the frustrating, expensive and labor-intensive process of organizing and maintaining a portal site. Now, with minimal effort, developers can build sites with real-time hypertext linking, advanced personalization features and the kinds of easy-to-navigate topical directories that people have grown accustomed to on some of today's most popular websites."

Several companies are already using beta versions of Portal-In-A-Box™. For example, INET Bridge, a joint venture between media group Pearson and financial information provider Bridge plc, employed Portal-In-A-Box™ to create an entire corporate financial information portal in one month. Autonomy's technology supports the INET Bridge portal's ongoing operation by automating the categorization, tagging, hypertext linking and personalization of real-time content from sources such as Reuters and The Financial Times.

Automated Hyperlinking Ensures That Links are Always Current and Saves Time and Labor

Autonomy's Portal-In-A-Box™ software eliminates the need for costly and time-consuming manual labor by automating hypertext linking. As site visitors retrieve web pages, the system reads and understands the text and automatically suggests relevant content from other sources. "Because the links are created at the time of retrieval, these links are always kept up to date," said Lynch. "So, if I pull up a six month old article about my favorite athlete, I will still get a real-time link to a breaking story about last night's game."

Advanced Personalization Features

Portal-In-A-Box™ also offers advanced personalization features. Site visitors can create personalized newsletters by using plain English to describe the topics they are interested in, no matter how specific or arbitrary these subjects may be.

"A jeweler concerned about Japanese manufacturers' shrinking pearl crops can train a software agent to track that exact topic," said Lynch. "On other portal sites, visitors would have to choose from preset categories like 'Japanese exports' or 'jewelry industry' or wade through the results of inaccurate keyword searches."

In addition, Autonomy's technology automatically alerts users whenever a subject of interest comes up in a chat room conversation or appears in a breaking news story. Portal-In-A-Box™ also offers the ability to create virtual communities of interest or workgroups by putting users with related or mutual interests in touch with each other.

Over time, the system will even personalize opening "splash pages" for each site visitor based on an analysis of text that they have previously read on the site. The advanced pattern recognition technology that fuels Autonomy's software analyzes the ideas in the content users read each time - not just the URLs in their click stream or their response to questionnaires or forms. More importantly, the technology continuously refines its understanding of each individual's interests and becomes increasingly accurate.

Create and Automatically Update Easy-to-Navigate Directories

With Portal-In-A-Box™, website developers can easily create and maintain the kind of directory structure that makes sites easy to navigate. Content is gathered from hundreds of specified websites, news feeds and Intranet sites. Rather than just listing all of the content sources and providing links to those sites, Autonomy's technology automatically organizes the content by subject matter, which makes site navigation much easier. For example, a developer for a health-oriented website, may create subject categories to track news about specific illnesses and fitness trends from a wide variety of medical journals, general fitness publications and mainstream newspapers.

Because the technology analyzes information based on concepts rather than simply by key words, it can make "fuzzy" concept matches between articles from medical journals that are filled with scientific jargon and general health news from mainstream newspapers. And setting up the directory structure is easy - online publishers may set up subject categories simply by using natural language to describe the topics or by providing sample documents. Once the directory headings are established, Autonomy's technology analyzes the information in all of the sources that the system is set up to monitor and automatically files the content into the appropriate categories, eliminating the need for manual labor.

About Autonomy

Autonomy (www.autonomy.com) develops software that automatically organizes large, unstructured volumes of information into personally relevant communications to help corporate Intranets and commercial websites serve the changing needs and interests of users. Autonomy's products for knowledge management and new media publishing save time, labor and money by automatically and precisely categorizing, linking, personalizing and searching large volumes of information.

The intelligent pattern recognition technology that fuels Autonomy's software was originally developed by Autonomy's sister company, Neurodynamics, for use in intelligence and defense applications. That technology is at the heart of the British police force's Holmes2 system, named after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary detective. The Holmes2 system helps the police solve crimes by matching fingerprints or by finding similarities and connections in disparate crime witness statements or police reports. The same technology is now being used to find connections in commercial data.

Autonomy was founded in 1996 and has offices in San Francisco, Boston, New York, Washington, D.C. and Cambridge, England. Autonomy customers include News Corp., MacMillan Publishing, Associated Press, Barclays Bank, Shell International, Semi-Tech, The Royal Mail and Unilever. On July 10, 1998, the company went public on the EASDAQ exchange, achieving a valuation of $165 million and raising $35 million dollars. The company's current valuation is $200 million.

For further information, please contact:
Autonomy at (415) 243-9955 or visit the company's website at http://www.autonomy.com/.

Press and analysts may contact:

Marivi Lerdo or Kris Marubio at Edelman Public Relations, ph: (415) 433-5381.

This is a selection of our forthcoming events, please visit our seminars page for more information.

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This is a small selection of the Autonomy case studies available, please visit our publications site at http://publications.autonomy.com/ for more information.

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