HP Completes Acquisition of Autonomy Corp.

Hewlett-Packard co. (NYSE:HPQ) on Monday completed its $1.2 billion acquisition of U.K based software company, Autonomy Corp.

Leo Apothekar had initiated this deal for HP which has turned out successful, unfortunately Leo lost his post from the company due to some issues with the management of the company over the future strategy of the company. Leo was replaced by Miss Whitman EX-CEO of eBay, who is following in the lines of her predecessor. HP now experiences sings of relief after a period of instability, when the board had to fire its ex-Chief Executive Officer Leo Apotheker last month.

HP has finally taken control over Autonomy Corporation’s 87.3 percent shares. These were purchased from the shareholders at 25.50 pounds a share in cash. HP desires to purchase remaining Autonomy shares in the coming months.

Mike Lynch, founder of Autonomy in 1996, will remain the Chief Executive Officer of Autonomy and will report directly to the newly appointed CEO, Meg Whitman. Autonomy will function as an individual business entity.

Miss Whitman said that the company has dedicated to help customers in resolving IT issues that they come across. HP will manufacture new technologies that would impact on people, organizations, government and the whole society. The company desires to use unstructured data for improved decision making and extending future growth. Searching unstructured data like emails, phone contacts and tweets that do not adjust in traditional databases is among one of the perspectives of Autonomy’s software.

Autonomy Corporation specializes in searching the so called unstructured data; it is capable of searching emails, text and voicemails, and also searching structured data such as spreadsheets and other organized databases.

Mike Lynch said that this a very important day for all our Autonomous employees and customers that we serve, as by merging HP’s valuable assets and Autonomy’s specialized skills to develop systems that will help hundreds of organizations.

There had been a minor issue between HP and Oracle last week, according to oracle, Autonomy had approached Oracle with a bid offer, but at that time the bid was too high.

HP’s Whitman has decided to continue with the announced split up of HP’s PC division and also the plans to shut down the WebOS division, which handles smart phones and tablets. The decision to shut down the tablet and smartphones was taken by Apothekar, bringing an end to the $1.2 billion acquisition made in April 2010. The PC division has been split off because of the declining sales of personal computers.

Post Written By: Ed Liston Ed Liston is a senior contributing editor at TheStockMarketWatch.com. An active market watcher and investor, Ed guides an independent team of experienced analysts and writes for multiple stock trader publications. He is widely quoted in various financial publications on the Internet. When Ed is not writing about stocks, investing in stocks, talking about stocks, or otherwise doing something stock related, he likes to go sailing and fishing in his yacht.