Automation: How and Why?

Autonomy's infrastructure technology enables computers to form an understanding of a piece of text, Web pages, e-mails, voice, documents and people automatically. Why is that important?

The Past...

Initially, the development of computers was focussed on automating statistical tasks such as adding numbers together. The 'rule sets' and instructions that enabled computers to automatically produce an answer to '1+1', were relatively simple and scalable to produce and led to such devices as the pocket calculator. However, simplicity and scalability proved impracticable and unachievable with human friendly data. Computers can't understand the meaning of 'one plus one' recorded in prose and are therefore unable to act upon it or process it in any meaningful way. Enter the database.

The advent of the database was aimed to overcome this problem and herald a method by which human friendly data could be stored, labelled and processed in accordance with manually created instructions (code) that enabled computers to process and act upon it. Albeit manually intensive, this approach worked until the decreasing costs of both technology and software led to an exponential increase in digital human-friendly information, created by a wide-array of incompatible applications. Today, the human-friendly information produced by these applications - text, Web pages, e-mails, voice, documents and images - accounts for the majority of digital information in existence. Whereas the database began an evolution, enabling computers to address unstructured information to some degree, the vast amounts and number of different formats in which unstructured information now exists has turned an evolution into a revolution. There is simply too much information to store, label and process in accordance with manually created instructions and the old labour intensive approach to handling human friendly information and to the challenges this revolution pose are too time and cost extravagant to employ. Enter Autonomy.

The Present...

Autonomy's technology enables computers to form an understanding of a piece of text, Web pages, e-mails, voice, documents, people and images automatically without labour intensive storage, labelling and processing routines. Now, software applications processing both structured and unstructured information can be revolutionised with the power of Autonomy and automatically perform a wide range of operations that reduces manual costs, increase speed & accuracy and provide real return on investment.

By automatically linking any combination of information, whether content-to-content, content-to-people or people-to-people, Autonomy's software provides a critical link in the value chain that removes manually intensive operations and their inherent costs.

In addition, Autonomy enables operations to take place in real time - a critical objective for any digital interaction. The ability to do so is more important than ever because over 80% of information inside the modern enterprise is now unstructured (or in human friendly form) and has become difficult to store, much less extract value.

Finally, Autonomy's sophisticated solution based on the content and the meaning of information provides unique accuracy and enables sophisticated and highly accurate interactions to take place regardless of traditional geographic, subject, language, format or application barriers.

Many software producers are discovering that embedding the power of Autonomy inside their own applications enables them to pass on reduced manual costs, increased speed & accuracy and provide their customers with an automated range of unstructured information operations. It also enables their application to link to other Autonomy enabled software via Autonomy's Content Infrastructure. (Find out more - ACI™).

The Future...

The prospect of a world of information managed via the content it contains, interconnected beyond the traditional barriers that we accept as the norm today or the barriers of behaviours that have disabled progress, is difficult to imagine. Accurate real-time personalisation regardless of device or location promises value beyond measure; managed in context sourced from global resources and linking text, voice and images; expertise identified by personal patterns of activity instead of manual description are all critical foundations toward the creation of organizational structures and enterprise wealth opportunities that until now have remained locked in the imagination.