HP-Autonomy deal nearly done

Autonomys impending acquisition by Hewlett-Packard is nearly done.

The $10.3 billion deal was cleared by regulators in the U.S. and Australia on Thursday.Autonomy shareholders still have till Monday morning 10:00 a.m. U.K time to weigh in, according to a company spokeswoman cited inreports.

Autonomys enterprise search capabilities could be a boost toHPs big data strategyand the purchase itself was a cornerstone of former CEO Leo Apothekers grand plan to build HPs enterprise software and cloud services portfolio.

There was some question last week after Meg Whitman succeeded Apotheker as CEO as to whether his whole strategy would prevail, but it looks like the Autonomy piece of it is proceeding as planned.

The Autonomy buy was controversial from the moment it was announced on HPs August 18 earnings call because of the price. The next day, in a show of disapproval of this deal and HPs decision to shop its PC business around, Wall Street lopped more than $12 billion off of HPs market cap.

The whole pricing question sparked an escalating war of words between Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison and HP/Autonomy. That controversy flared again today when Oracle posted a statementabout the matter again and Autonom y responded.

Oracle and HP, once fairly tight partners, have been at odds since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and its hardware business, putting the two companies in direct competition in the data center hardware market. That contention ratcheted up after Oracle hired Mark Hurd, HPs deposed CEO, last year as co-president.

Today there was more speculation that HPs decision to replace Apotheker with Whitman was made to shore up HPs share price so that Oracle could not buy the company.

Image courtesy of flickr usermelmada

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