HP Completes Autonomy Buyout at $12B
Hewlett-Packard completed the US$ 12 Billion buyout of Autonomy, a UK software firm.
The deal went through even if the person who initiated it is not part of HP anymore. British takeover laws make it impossible to cancel the bid. Leo Apotheker was replaced by Meg Whitman as CEO of Hewlett Packard one month ago. Reasons cited were declining sales and falling share prices. HP shares tumbled 47% this year.
HP rival Oracle remarked that the deal is "absurdly high". Oracle further claimed that Autonomy also approached them for a buyout. This was denied my Autonomy.
Apotheker garnered publicity when he announced that HP will stop making PCs, tablets, and smartphones. Hewlett Packard is the biggest PC manufacturer in the world with a 17.6% share of the market.
Instead, They will otherwise focus more on their software division. That's where Autonomy fits in.
Autonomy is a software company that specializes in data extraction. According to their website, "Autonomy's technology can understand any form of unstructured information, whether text, voice or video, and based on that understanding perform automatic operations on the information, such as powering the world's leading enterprise search engine, automatically suggesting an answer to a call center operator, profiling millions of documents for a legal case, or monitoring television channels for intelligence agencies...".
In a nutshell, the technology can gather information from sources outside of a computer such as a phone call, radio broadcast or a TV show and process it.
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