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One of the drawbacks of running a global software developer is that people assume that you are based in California's Silicon Valley. For Mike Lynch, the academic chief executive of Autonomy, that assumption means regular wake-up calls at four in the morning from customers in Asia who assume he works on Pacific standard time. Since Autonomy purchased its main rival, Verity, last year, the company has headquarters in both Cambridge and San Francisco, as well as an office in Beijing - cities eight hours apart. As a result, Mr Lynch now works around the clock.

Although he was spared the early-morning wake-up call yesterday, the first thing he does upon waking is check his e-mails for any issues emanating from Asia. "The laptop lives by the side of the bed, I'm afraid," he said.

Irish-born but raised in Essex, Mr Lynch is one of the last men standing from the high-profile UK technology boom at the end of the last decade. Seen as somewhat of an evangelist, Mr Lynch's unwavering faith in the value of the company's context-based search technology has helped to steer the Cambridge-based company through hard times over the past few years. "The cult of personality is important in technology," he explained. Yet unlike in the US where the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison are household names, Mr Lynch said that it can be a slight disadvantage in the UK, where people are a bit more wary of someone being too dominant within a company.

With revenue growth now over 20 per cent, Mr Lynch's position at the top of one of the UK's five largest software companies looks strong. His name is synonymous with Autonomy - in which he holds a 12 per cent stake - as the software is based in part on his Cambridge doctoral thesis, one of the most widely read pieces of research at the Cambridge University library. The thesis was submitted in 1990, and Mr Lynch founded Autonomy in 1994, with financial backing provided by an anonymous music-industry executive. In 1996 Autonomy became a fully independent company, and was listed in 1998. A decade later Autonomy is valued at around pounds 725m, and Mr Lynch is still steering the ship.

9.30am

A meeting with new investors is not as straightforward as pointing to revenue growth and future prospects. Mr Lynch, who turned 41 in April, spends much time and effort explaining what exactly his company does.

# posted by Medical Information : 2:44 AM