Dr Lynch’s next moves

03 Oct 2012

In an exclusive interview with IP EXPO, our opening keynote speaker Dr Mike Lynch drops a few clues on his future plans.

It’s been more than four months since Dr Mike Lynch left Autonomy, the software company he set up in Cambridge in 1996 and sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2011 for £11 billion. Since then, his next move has been a source of speculation and debate among industry-watchers, but the man himself has stayed quiet.

The impression he gives, however, is that there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. “It’s no secret that the whole management team left Autonomy. I was the last to leave,” he says. “We’re all back together now and what we’re focusing on is unlocking the technology potential of the UK.”

He’s not giving much away, then, but what’s true is that there’s a wealth of talent among the former Autonomy employees who left HP in the months after the takeover. These include CFO Steve Chamberlain, president Sushovan Hussain, CTO Pete Menell, COO Andy Kanter and CMO Nicole Eagan. Alongside these senior executives, a stack of sales staff and developers are said to have headed for the door, too.

Some or all of these might be expected to join Lynch’s new team. What areas of technology they might focus on, meanwhile, is a subject he’s happier to discuss.

“There’s a lot of change going on in the enterprise IT world at the moment. From the regimented model of control that we’ve seen before, we’re moving into world where people try to get around that model and their work-related activities, in a sense, go underground.” That shift in control is seen in the consumerisation of IT, he says, where people bring their own devices to work, and in cloud, where individual teams commission their own document storage services without IT’s say-so, for example. It’s seen in employee use of social media, too, and in big data, where there’ a danger that controls relating to regulation and e-discovery could be overlooked, in favour of deeper analysis.

This shift in enterprise IT will be the subject of Lynch’s opening keynote at IP EXPO 2012, ‘It’s enterprise technology, but not as we know it."

“It’s a real upheaval for enterprise IT, a fundamental shift for enterprise architecture and it’s here I see a lot of opportunities,” says Lynch. There’s no reason at all, he adds, why a British company shouldn’t help to fill that gap. “In the UK, we’re very, very good at inventing this fundamental ‘stuff’. Autonomy had fundamental technology at the heart of it. ARM has fundamental technology, too. The problem is that there’s too few of these companies but I’m still hopeful that there will be more in future.”

As a fellow of Christ’s College Cambridge and a committee member of various academic bodies, Lynch sees a great deal of work going on in UK universities that could be developed into commercial technology products, he says. It’s been widely rumoured that he plans to set up his own technology investment fund with the £800 million he made out of the Autonomy sale to HP, but his comments and the ongoing collaboration with former Autonomy colleagues suggest a more active, hands-on role at a new company. Maybe he’ll do both, but he’s not ready to announce either yet, beyond making the following cryptic comment:

“I feel like the guy on the old variety show who’s spinning plates. We all went off to speed up the start-up plate, thinking that the big-company plate was fine, and now that one’s fallen and I need to get it going again. I’ve been a bit backwards and forwards, but the whole thing’s moving ahead.”

Dr Mike Lynch’s opening keynote at this year’s IP EXPO will take place on Wednesday 17 October at 09:50 in the Keynote Theatre.

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