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Autonomy misled HP about finances, Hewlett Packard says

bbc.co.uk

1–10 of 31 posts

Re: Autonomy misled HP about finances, Hewlett Packard says

#3
Wasn't Autonomy a public company when HP acquired it ? Was it not the responsibility of HP board and management and their investment bankers to do due diligence before they made such a big acquisition ?

Could it be that HP management , having lost the position of largest PC maker to Lenovo, is looking to throw our attention away from their incompetence.

Re: Autonomy misled HP about finances, Hewlett Packard says

#5

Wasn't Autonomy a public company when HP acquired it ? Was it not the responsibility of HP board and management and their investment bankers to do due diligence before they made such a big acquisition ? Could it be that HP management , having lost the position of largest PC maker to Lenovo, is looking to throw our attention away from their incompetence.

I agree. This story is quite hard to believe... Nobody spends $12bn without looking carefully into the books. There always is a long and thorough Due Diligence process on transactions like this one. Investment bankers, lawyers and accountants get get their fees mainly for going through every single document in the company...

Re: Autonomy misled HP about finances, Hewlett Packard says

#6
post #2

> Autonomy founder Mike Lynch is a non-executive director of the BBC. Way to go journalistic impartiality at the BBC.

If they hadn't disclosed that information, then I would see it as a problem.

They only disclose it because they have to. What interests me is, what exactly is he doing with the BBC?

Re: Autonomy misled HP about finances, Hewlett Packard says

#7
I worked for a company that was Acquired by Autonomy. They made us fire a large portion of our staff before the final papers were signed so that they could continue with their claims that they never fired people as the result of an acquisition.

Slimy Bastards if you ask me. This does not surprise me in the least.

Re: Autonomy misled HP about finances, Hewlett Packard says

#8
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they hadn't disclosed that information, then I would see it as a problem.

They only disclose it because they have to. What interests me is, what exactly is he doing with the BBC?

Their press release from 6 years ago: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2006/...

They seem to have a wide range of people from different backgrounds and industries. It's a non executive role, so I assume it's more for 'experience and wisdom' in their respective fields and expertise than anything else.

Re: Autonomy misled HP about finances, Hewlett Packard says

#9
I have no comment on Autonomy's finances. We did however evaluate it's product vs Google's search appliance.

The Google Appliance we pretty much plugged in and let it do it's thing. After a few days it was giving excellent results on our massive (80,000 people) company intranet.

The Autonomy server had to be constantly tweaked and fiddled with to even get it near to the relevance of the results.

Unfortunately, Autonomy had flogged a loads of licenses to another part of the business for peanuts, so we had to go with their inferior product.

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