AUTNF people...please ask for more! @ least $12.6 Bln... Or go it alone!
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Founded in 1996, Autonomy specializes in software that analyzes documents and data for so-called “unstructured information” and looks for links that can be tied together to understand relationships between documents.
Whit Andrews, who covers business-analytics software for Gartner Inc., said H-P would likely be interested in the company because it has been trying to build up its information-management strategy for years and Autonomy is a “marquee vendor.”
“What you are looking at here is the largest vendor in unstructured analytics,” Andrews said. “They do a lot of big deals in the regulatory market and their margins are very healthy.”
Sue Feldman of IDC said the acquisition “would give H-P a very nice foothold into the [business-analytics] software business to go along with their storage products. They haven’t had these pieces before.”
/quotes/zigman/229301/quotes/nls/hpq HPQ 28.85, -0.66, -2.24%
If the deal goes through, it would be H-P’s third-largest acquisition, after it bought EDS for approximately $12.5 billion in 2008 and its contentious, nearly $20 billion acquisition of Compaq in 2002.
Separately, Hewlett-Packard said its board of directors had given the green light to explore options for its personal-systems group, also known as its PC business. H-P said those alternatives include spinning off or selling the business.
H-P also said it would discontinue operations for its webOS-based devices, including it TouchPad tablet and webOS phones.
The company also announced its preliminary fiscal third-quarter results, with earnings of 93 cents a share on $31.2 billion in revenue, compared with a profit of 75 cents a share on sales of $30.7 billion in the year-ago period.
Excluding one-time items, H-P would have earned $1.10 a share. Analysts surveyed by FactSet Research had forecast the company to earn $1.09 a share on $31.2 billion in revenue |
