Boy, you take a few months off and the world goes crazy.
Congratulations to the guys at Autonomy (LSE: AUTN) for unloading that hodgepodge of old enterprise applications businesses for top dollar to HP.
Maybe it's something to do with Euro to dollar exchange rate... or a way to save on U.S. corporate taxes by not repatriating profits... or something else not immediately obvious... Whatever, HP (HPQ) is
- back in a business it shouldn't be in
- will be trying to sell a half dozen products that didn't sell that well when they had their own brandnames on them
- tyring to sell them into a market dominated by Microsoft (MSFT), Adobe (ADBE) and IBM
- [I think even Oracle (ORCL) and Open Text (OTEX) are slightly bigger than HP will be in the content software market if the deal goes through but Oracle and Open Text have just as much a hodgepodge of products as Autonomy.]
- [Google (GOOG) could have entered this market with gusto anytime in the last 10 years and hasn't; does that tell you something?)
Supposedly this deal has driven up the share prices of MicroFocus and Sage a few pence (Is a pence what I think it is?) and put SAP and Software Ag (SOW) in play.
It would be interesting to know if Oracle had bid and if this price was just the result of some kind of male-urination contest.
-- Dennis Byron
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