Autonomy Corporation plc, a global leader in infrastructure software, and Iron Mountain Incorporated, the information management company, has announced a definitive agreement for Autonomy to acquire selected key assets of Iron Mountain's digital division including archiving, eDiscovery and online backup for $380M.

Post-closing Autonomy expects to have a gross cash balance of at least $700 million and expected go-forward revenues of approximately $130 million to $140 million.

"We are pleased to announce this transaction, one we have been looking at for some time, which will bring significant advancements for customers," commented Dr. Mike Lynch, Group CEO of Autonomy. "Processing customer data in the cloud continues to be a strategic part of Autonomy's information governance business. We look forward to extending regulatory compliance, legal discovery and analytics to a host of new customers as well as enabling the intelligent collection and processing of non-regulatory data from distributed servers, PCs and especially tens of millions of mobile devices. This will afford the opportunity to bring to these customers the power of IDOL's meaning-based technology."

Dr. Lynch continued, "In 2007 we correctly predicted the merging of regulatory archiving and search, and we believe we are now seeing the next phase where the convergence of regulatory archiving, back-up and data restoration with operational processing of data in the cloud is coming to pass. This acquisition makes Autonomy the cloud platform of choice, processing and understanding 25 petabytes of customer information. IDOL will allow significantly more value, analytical insight and return to be generated for our customers from this cloud platform. This places Autonomy at the centre of the changes in the analytics of unstructured data, processing in the cloud-based platforms and desktop virtualization.

We've had the opportunity to buy strong assets at an attractive valuation, and through the application of our intelligent IDOL dark server technology will greatly increase the efficiency of this offering. Whilst others may be creating roadmaps around virtualizing the enterprise and processing information in the cloud, Autonomy is already doing it in the world's largest private cloud platform."