Profile: Sushovan Hussain, group CFO of Autonomy

For a FTSE 250 technology company Autonomy goes about its business pretty
quietly. Even with a billion-pound market capitalisation and a whole gamut of
large global companies as clients – Vodafone, BP, Ford, GlaxoSmithKline and Coca
Cola – it maintains a pretty low profile.

This may change after co-founder and chief executive Dr Michael Lynch’s
recent heavy criticism of Google for ‘dumbing down’ search technology. His
outbursts do, of course, give a vague indication of Autonomy’s raison d’être.

While Autonomy mystically refers to its technology as ‘meaning-based
computing’, understanding what it does is easier than you would expect.
Simplistically, it provides methods for scouring through, and making sense of,
the massive growth in ‘unstructured’ information that businesses hold, whether
it be through documents, emails, telephone conversations or other media.

This information is difficult to sift through and make useful for businesses,
but Autonomy’s technology enables companies to do just that. It can take the
form of tracking illegal activity in a company, or in Ford’s case enabling the
company to transform its text, audio and video files in its research libraries
so its 150,000 employees can be up to date on new projects.

For group CFO Sushovan Hussain explaining what the company does has been
merely a side issue during his five-year tenure. The business, itself just ten
years old, has weathered the dotcom collapse, increasing regulation and gone
through various share placings on financial markets.

Throw in more than $600m (£330m) of acquisitions last year, including the
purchase of main rival Verity, and it is easy to understand why Hussain has had
plenty on his plate. ‘I see myself primarily as a financial policeman, but this
past year has been extremely busy.’

Meeting shareholders and analysts, shuttling between Autonomy’s dual head
offices in Cambridge and San Francisco and integrating Verity have been immedia
te issues. Making sure the figures add up and keeping up the company’s momentum
of growth are long-term goals. Autonomy has reported positive quarterly profit
figures for three years. ‘We’ve already achieved cost synergies from the
acquisition. Verity suffered big Sox compliance costs, their quarterly bill
being more than our annual fee was.’

R&D focus

But the momentum of growth will depend on the heartbeat of all technology
businesses: research and development investment, which is vital for the future
of the company, Hussain explains.‘For our search and categorisation functions,
Autonomy has to have the R&D focus to make it powerful.’

Despite working in one of the most technologically expansive and savvy
businesses, Hussain is more old fashioned when it comes to the company’s finance
function.

He sees a professional accountancy qualification as ‘key’ when looking at new
recruits. ‘The chartered accounting qualification is still the gold standard, or
one of the other qualifications. We look for the same when we recruit overseas,
and also for some operational experience.’

His own experience, as an ICAEW-qualified accountant (he trained at Ernst
& Whinney), set him on the path to taking on his role as finance director.
In particular, his experience at oil and gas business LASMO, where he helped to
fend off a hostile takeover by Enterprise Oil, gave him M&A experience that
proved invaluable when he was ‘quizzed’ by Autonomy management for his job.

M&A and corporate development are two areas that Hussain believes are
fundamentals that need to be ticked off on a potential FD’s CV, also vital is
some operational experience as a divisional FD. ‘It’s all about gaining diverse
experience to be a CFO of a large company, understanding real nitty-gritty
stuff, like supervising payroll and checking invoices.’

But it’s ultimately all about information, whether it’s ‘unstructured’ or
‘structured’. In Autonomy’s case, the latter relates to numerical data, which is
much easier to assimilate, process and analyse. Even though Autonomy leaves
structured data to database giants, such as Oracle, it does not mean that
finance directors are averse to Autonomy’s charms.

Hussain says that growth in business compliance issues has seen his company
provide risk assessment tools and investigative technology, much of its work
driven specifically by Sarbanes–Oxley.

Of the much-feared US compliance regime, Hussain says Autonomy made the
decision to quit its listing on NASDAQ because of the onerous requirements of
Sox. ‘Costs to [meet listing requirements] were prohibitive, astronomical – the
listing equated to many thousands of dollars in cost per trade’.

Markets force

As most major US shareholders in the company bought shares through its LSE
listing, the decision to quit NASDAQ was easy, and major investors such as
Fidelity were ‘supportive’.

Autonomy listed on EASDAQ in 1998, the pan-European technology stock exchange
that went belly-up in 2003 as the dotcom bubble burst. ‘There was no AIM market
back then, it was nascent,’ Hussain says of the now popular London-based
Alternative Investment Market. Fortunately it avoided EASDAQ’s problems by
delisting. It is now listed on the LSE.

For a brief time, back in 2001 during the heady days of the internet boom,
Autonomy scaled the heights of the FTSE 100. Now it just operates on the LSE,
and finds itself almost without peer, in terms of both the lack of thriving
technology businesses on the exchange, and within its own marketplace.

Last year Autonomy stepped up a gear when it purchased rival Verity for
$500m. The deal was hailed by the company as a ‘complementary fit’, while many
industry commentators thought the purchase was more important for Autonomy in
terms of creating mass.

With Google pushing heavily into the corporate search market, and Microsoft,
IBM and Oracle sniffing around as well, the view of the industry could well be
spot on. Hussain admits the company was intent on ‘taking market share’, and the
deal has already seen the company post its highest quarterly revenues at $56m
for the first quarter of 2006, compared with $18m a year earlier.

Both sets of management planned ahead for the deal, and only 5% of the total
workforce was lost. As Autonomy was more technology focused, Hussain says that
Verity’s strong sales and marketing teams complimented his company – so both
back offices and respective product lines fitted together snugly.

He’s also proud of how the company has got itself into a ‘unique’ market
position, but admits that Google is looking to compete on its turf. One Autonomy
product, a corporate search engine known as ULTRASEEK, is directly up against
the ubiquitous Google.

Overall Hussain is comfortable that the market for search technologies is
large enough for all. Autonomy will keep on investing in R&D, and the rest
will fall into place. ‘R&D is the lifeblood,’ he says. With 80% of data in
unstructured form, a booming compliance market and IT budgets rising, Hussain
thinks the FTSE 250 company is well positioned.

Whether he will be as comfortable if Google keeps improving its corporate
search engine is another matter. But he is certainly not a worried man, and more
relaxed about Google than his boss.

Cross Atlantic antics

Sushovan Hussain, chief financial officer of Autonomy, does plenty of
traveling back and forth between the company’s dual head offices in Cambridge
and San Francisco.

However, his previous experience in senior financial roles at oil company
LASMO has seen him based in some of the world’s most exotic and uninhabited
regions in the world.

After being involved in fending off a hostile takeover of his employers LASMO
by Enterprise Oil, he moved to Venezuela with his young family as finance
manager of what he describes as a ‘massive operation’.

‘While you can get good experience at 24, 25 or 26 years old doing general
ledgers, the real experience comes as the head of finance.’

After a year in that role he moved to one of the provinces on the Western
side of Pakistan. ‘The local indigenous population didn’t have TV, they lived in
tribes. We had to be extremely careful in developing a $500m (£275m) gas field.
Liquifying the gas, heating it up is tricky and you have to be extremely careful
in not displacing the indigenous population and looking after the historical
sights in what was a desert.’

To ensure that LASMO was working with the environment as much as possible
rather than against it, the company hired experts in the area, who told him that
the company could not build anywhere near an ancient wall. ‘We were very
environmentally aware,’ he recalls.