Hewlett-Packard Co. recently announced their intention to buy Autonomy Corp. for $10.3 billion. This will give the company more leverage outside of PC sales by increasing their ability to offer cloud services.
“Their focus is on being more of a software and services company and not dependent on the hardware businesses,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner Inc. “The hardware business has become a difficult business. In many ways it’s a commodity-driven business. This is a major strategic shift for HP.”
Simultaneously, Hewlett-Packard also said it’s considering spinning off its PC division, which has seen decreasing margins in recent years. The company also announced that it will discontinue products that run WebOS software, not even a half year after the company was going to put the software on every HP PC.
“This is clearly a financial decision on their part to abandon a business that wasn’t generating nearly enough margins,” said Mark Margevicius, a Gartner Inc. analyst. “It’s the boat anchor that’s keeping things at bay.”
“For HP it’s an intriguing volte face,” said Tim Daniels, a strategist at Olivetree Securities Ltd. in London. “Autonomy is a leader in unstructured data — so that’s data that isn’t in the form of spreadsheets or word documents.”
Source: Bloomberg
