Astrazeneca Selects Autonomy's Technology to Assist in Global Drug Development and Product Delivery.

Business Editors

SAN FRANCISCO & CAMBRIDGE, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 11, 2000

Autonomy Corporation plc (NASDAQ:AUTN)(EASDAQ:AUTN)

All Areas of the Company--from R&d to Business Management--to

Benefit From Automated Knowledge Management System

Autonomy Corporation plc (NASDAQ:AUTN)(EASDAQ:AUTN) today announced that AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN), the major international pharmaceutical company known for its research and products in many critical disease areas, including oncology, gastrointestinal and cardiovascular diseases, has adopted Autonomy's Portal-in-a-Box(tm) product to automatically manage and personalise information to help in the fight against chronic illnesses.

Using Portal-in-a-Box(TM), AstraZeneca will be able to automatically categorise information from a wide range of internal and external sources - the Web, the Intranet, internal documents and e-mails - and deliver it to the appropriate users in real time, as the information becomes available.

The ability to manage information automatically in this way enables users to cut through the growing volume of unstructured information - Web pages, Intranet pages, e-mails, word processing files - that characterise today's businesses. The volume of information on the Web alone is doubling every three months; within enterprises, one in five companies has had to increase its network resources by 75% or more to manage its growing corporate information.

At the heart of Autonomy's software is a pattern recognition technology, which has the ability to analyse a piece of text and identify the main ideas. This enables the software to then determine how the text should be categorised, who should see it, what other relevant material it should be linked to, and how it should be tagged - which all happens automatically.

Duncan Fyfe, Director of Informatics, Product Strategy and Licensing at AstraZeneca, commented: "The growing volume of unstructured information in any enterprise is threatening to overwhelm the users of that information. By using Autonomy, we can ensure that the right material reaches the right person at the right time. This in turn means that our staff are better informed, our research decisions better supported, and the costs typically associated with managing information significantly reduced."

Dr. Mike Lynch, Group CEO of Autonomy, said: "AstraZeneca has recognised that its need to manage vast amounts of information and tailor it to individual users cannot be addressed using only manual or keyword-based approaches. Autonomy gives AstraZeneca the edge by enabling it to manage its information automatically, on the basis of content. This makes for more effective knowledge management and translates ultimately into more rapid advances in research."

AstraZeneca

AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN), is a major international healthcare business engaged in the research, development, manufacture and marketing of ethical (prescription) pharmaceuticals and the supply of healthcare services. It is one of the top five pharmaceutical companies in the world with healthcare sales of over $15 billion and leading positions in sales of gastrointestinal, oncology, anaesthesia including pain management, cardiovascular, central nervous system (CNS) and respiratory products.

About Autonomy

Autonomy's technology powers large-scale, personalised systems to support the infrastructure of the Internet economy, across areas including knowledge management, enterprise portals, new media publishing and electronic commerce applications. Because of its ability to analyse any piece of text (independent of the document's language) and identify and rank the main ideas therein, Autonomy can automate a broad range of labour-intensive tasks. These range from categorising information by subject matter, to inserting hypertext links to related material, to profiling users based on the ideas in the text they read or write, to delivering information to those most likely to be interested.

Autonomy was founded in 1996 and has offices in San Francisco, New York, Atlanta and Boston, in the United States as well as in Cambridge (England), Paris, Oslo, Stockholm, Sydney, Frankfurt, Munich, Milan, Brussels and Amsterdam. Among its 200 customers are Alcatel, Associated Press, British Aerospace, News Corp., Tesco, Burda, Eli Lilly, Elsevier, Lucent Technologies, Merrill Lynch, TF1, BBC, Reuters, The Royal Mail, the US Army, the US Navy and NASA. In addition, many software companies are licensing Autonomy's technology to add intelligence to their own products, in areas as diverse as online publishing, knowledge management, email routing, and document management. These include including Vignette, Hewlett-Packard, Brio, Sybase, OpenMarket, Intranet Solutions, Intraspect, Insight and Nexor. Autonomy also has collaborative partnership agreements with worldwide corporations including Compaq, Sun Microsystems and Intel.

In July 1998, the company went public on the EASDAQ exchange (EASDAQ: AUTN). It floated on NASDAQ (NASDAQ: AUTN) in May 2000.

Note:

With the exception of historical information, the matters set forth in this news release are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. A number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These factors include, among others, dependence on core technology; limited operating history; fluctuations in quarterly results; dependence on new product development; rapid technological and market change; reliance on sales by others; management of growth; dependence on key personnel; rapid expansion; technology risks; volatility of stock price; growth of the Internet; financial risk management; and future growth subject to risks. These factors and other factors which could cause actual results to differ materially are also discussed in the company's filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, including Autonomy's Registration Statement on Form F-1, File no. 333-11804.