Mike Lynch - Agenda Setters 2008

Name: Mike Lynch

Title: Autonomy founder and CEO

Position: 5    Last year: Not ranked

Why? A visionary tech entrepreneur and innovator

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After missing out last year, previous Agenda Setter Mike Lynch returns to the list with an all time high at number five.

The Autonomy founder and CEO remains the driving force behind the intelligent search and knowledge management software company - and is arguably one of the UK's most successful technology entrepreneurs with a personal fortune estimated at $500m, according to The Sunday Times rich list.

With a market capitalisation of $4bn, Autonomy has enjoyed a meteoric rise since its humble beginnings at Cambridge University in 1996.

Autonomy's software solves a problem so many businesses face: making sense of the masses of data and information in their enterprise systems.

The key is a Bayesian statistics inference model, which uses pattern recognition to identify the context, meaning and relevance of a piece of unstructured information.

But it's not just for Autonomy's success that Lynch caught the Agenda Setters panel's eye - it's for his leadership in the UK IT industry and beyond.

As one judge described Lynch: "[He is] a truly inspirational UK entrepreneur who is leading a world class organisation, which probably stands out only behind SAP in the European technology landscape as a true innovator."