Autonomy deal marks HP’s journey away from PCs – Telegraph.co.uk
Just before Christmas 2004, IBM, the pioneer of personal computers in America, sold its PC business to Chinese company Lenovo for $1.75bn. It’s taken Leo Apotheker, HP’s new chief executive and former head of German software giant SAP, to follow suit.
And Dell’s warning on Tuesday night will have done little to weaken the conviction around HP’s board room to quit a PC business where margins can be as low as 2pc to 3pc.
But this is about more than the state of the economy for HP. It’s about adapting to an era in which corporations and governments expect far more from their technology providers than simple hardware.
With the world producing ever greater amounts of data, businesses want software that allows them not only to store the data but analyse it and, ideally, generate money from it.
And that’s where Autonomy, whose technology to analyse data was first developed at Cambridge University, comes in.
“It’s an area that IBM has had a lot of success in and the Autonomy acquisition will really beef it up for HP,” said Wu of Sterne Agee & Leach.
The swoop on Autonomy is not HP’s first attempt to beef up the range of data services and analytics it can offer. This time last year, HP, then without a chief executive, won a bidding war for 3Par, which makes the software that helps companies store data. And in February, it acquired Vertica, a Boston company that analyses data.
But the capture of Britain’s leading software company is without doubt the most high-profile move in HP’s journey away from PCs. Time will tell whether the deal marks the moment that Apotheker changed HP’s direction for good.