back to article Autonomy to HP: bollocks

The HP-Autonomy spat has, predictably, turned into a high-profile slanging match, with Autonomy founder Mike Lynch firing back at Meg Whitman via the Wall Street Journal. Hewlett-Packard has sensationally written down the value of the software company it acquired last year by nearly $US9 billion, and blamed Autonomy for “ …

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  1. Anonymous Coward 101

    HP = twats

    Everything I read about this takeover at the time said HP were mad to pay the price they were paying. They are now screaming sour grapes, and trying to recoup some cash.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: HP = twats

      They should have stuck to making brown sauce.

      1. Synonymous Howard

        Re: HP = twats

        yeah true .. when they branched out to Fruity, Bold and BBQ versions things went a bit wrong and don't get me started on HP Guinness!

        1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

          Re: HP = twats

          Well, HP brown sauce is in the same category as Twinkies. And Twinkies are dead now.

          1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
            Unhappy

            Re: Re: HP = twats

            "....HP brown sauce is in the same category as Twinkies...." I'm a bad Englishman because I think I'd miss Twinkies more than brown sauce.

          2. Ian Michael Gumby
            Boffin

            Re: HP = twats but Twinkies will live on...

            Sorry, but when Interstate bakeries goes belly up, they will sell off the brands.

            They will appear under a different name.

            1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

              Re: HP = twats but Twinkies will live on...

              > They will sell off the brands.

              They will sell off the brands. But they won't sell off the jobs.

    2. tirk
      Flame

      Re: HP = twats

      HP to SEC. " We screwed up, and lost a bundle of cash from the US economy. However, we have these convenient British scapegoats - can you get the money back for us please? You can always extradite the former management and owners if that helps.

  2. Nate Amsden

    Autonomy admitted fault

    It was an executive at Autonomy themselves that raised this accounting issue to HP earlier this year, after Whitman fired the former Autonomy leadership.

    The leadership was fired after they missed their own targets.

    When the whistle blower blew the whistle they investigated and I guess they just recently completed the investigation.

    interview with Whitman:

    http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232/?video=3000130511&play=1

    Most people believed this acquisition was bad from the start.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Meh

      Re: Autonomy admitted fault

      "It was an executive at Autonomy themselves that raised this accounting issue to HP earlier this year"

      Let's see if they'll stand up in court and publicly make that accusation then, and also let's see if they really are an "executive".

      Moreover, if they were so convinced that this was going on, why didn't they notify the UK authorities that they were aware of this fraud?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Just because the Hewlett Packard board

    Just because the Hewlett Packard board are (clearly) pillocks, and have been for years, it doesn't necessarily follow that the Autonomy purchase didn't involve dodgy dealing.

    Hewlett Packard. That's what BBC R4 News were calling HP at 6pm this evening.

    Where's Matt?

    1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      Alert

      Re: Just because the Hewlett Packard board

      ".....Where's Matt?" Chasing friends in low places for an unofficial response out of KPMG. ;)

  4. John H Woods Silver badge

    I remember ...

    ... the consensus here on the Reg was that the valuation was mad. Yet all the experts, KPMG and the usual suspects, and HPs own due diligence team, were sure that it was fine. More recently the commentard consensus seemed to be much more accurate than 'the professionals' re: facebook.

    Amazing how the people who are paid to get it right can get it so wrong, often at so little cost to themselves personally, however much it costs their corporations.

    1. Robert E A Harvey

      Re: I remember ...

      Good, healthy ripostes though. I'm waiting for them to cast the movie.

    2. Oninoshiko
      FAIL

      Re: I remember ...

      Larry Ellison turned it down at 1/3 the price.

      Larry is an asshole, but he isn't stupid.

      (http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/oracle-issues-statement-nasdaq-orcl-1566697.htm)

      fail, meg, fail

      1. Oninoshiko

        Re: I remember ...

        sorry, that should have been 2/3s

      2. Matt Bryant Silver badge
        FAIL

        Re: Re: I remember ...

        "...fail, meg, fail" Autonomy was bought by Shane Robison under Leo's guidance and mandate. Meg didn't arrive until later. Fail, commentard, fail!

        1. Oninoshiko
          Facepalm

          Meg's fail

          Ahh, but Leo isn't crying about how unfailr it is. Meg is. A stupid deal was made without due diligence. Just admit it, and get to work fixing things. Don't cry "it's unfair, we didn't know it was a bad deal," you say, "this was a fuckup, but I am here to make sure these types of things don't contenue."

          Sorry for not spelling that out well enough for you, Matt.

          1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
            Stop

            Re: Meg's fail

            "Ahh, but Leo isn't crying about how unfailr it is...." Well are you surprised? He no longer works at hp, he was given theboot and a golden parachute. He's probably laughing all the way to the bank.

            "....Meg is...." Well it IS her job to do so. By law, she has to declare any accounting shennigans that may be fraudulent.

            ".... A stupid deal was made without due diligence...." Whether the deal was stupid is debateable, but due dilligence was tried. It appears that Deloitte or KPMG or Shane Robison are the ones that failed to do their jobs.

            "....Just admit it...." What, that you're wrong?

            "....and get to work fixing things...." Sorry, not my job. Whilst hp might be able to afford me I'm not legally qualified to go sorting through Autnomy's acounts and try clawing back and cash in court. Mind you, Leo probably wasn't qualified for his job either, but I posted on these forums at the time I thought so. Maybe I should give Meg a call....

            "....Sorry for not spelling that out well enough for you, Matt." Oh, don't worry, it came though loud and clear that your desire for screaming abuse at hp far surpasses that for rational analysis.

    3. James Anderson

      Re: I remember ...

      You rise in consulting and management by telling the boss/customer what they want to here.

      Eventually this results in an echo chamber where only good news and predictions bright sunny futures are heard. Plus a smattering of "lets reduce headcount" so they can feel macho as well as brilliant.

      This all works splendidly until the innocent lad asks why the emperor is naked, or, the shareholders ask to see the money.

      Anyway serves the septics right, They unload there Sub-Prime mortgages on our banks, we unload our super-hyped startup on them.

    4. nematoad
      FAIL

      Re: I remember ...

      "Amazing how the people who are paid to get it right..."

      That's the nub of it right there. They are paid to deliver a certain result and if inconvenient facts get in the way of their payday, why then, they'll just ignore them.

      If they are wrong then they can just shrug their shoulders and walk off, if they are right then they are the "experts".

      Either way they will be paid their fees.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HP & Advisors Either Incompetent or Doubly Incompetent

    Autonomy was a good business, HP needed more software in their portfolio and proportionately less hardware. However, HP spectacularly overpaid, fraud or not. I expect they were poorly advised (clue: 5% of $10.7B is worth a lot more than 5% of say $1B).

    If (and I mean IF) Autonomy management are guilty of what HP accues them (channel stuffing, revenue recognition naughtiness, and product cross-subsidy) then HP and their advisors simply look doubly incompetent. These are the oldest tricks in the book and I would expect the average analyst in his 1st year M&A work to know about them and go hunting for them when crawling over the company.

    1. Nate Amsden

      Re: HP & Advisors Either Incompetent or Doubly Incompetent

      From what I heard part of the revalations was that the margins on Autonomy ended up being much lower than originally thought (post accounting shenanigans). Originally deemed in the upper 40s to 50% range now it's in the upper 20s to 30% range.

      That alone apparently would of been enough to slash it's valuation. From what I heard earlier today anyway - not my area of expertise of course.

      I suspected something was up not long ago when HP started doing quite a bit of lay-offs of Autonomy folks.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: HP & Advisors Either Incompetent or Doubly Incompetent

      I think Autonomy and their investment bankers came in and told the HP management team that Autonomy would not only be "Google for the enterprise", but, bonus, it was also "in the cloud." As soon as they heard Google and cloud, no price was too high to pay.

  6. ElNumbre
    Trollface

    Assumptions

    I assume they'll be able to write off a load of tax payments against it?

    1. Tom 35

      Re: Assumptions

      What tax?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    Based on what I know of Autonomy...

    None of this about shambolic management and cooked books would surprise me. What would surprise me is how HP's due diligence missed it.

    1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: Based on what I know of Autonomy...

      ".... how HP's due diligence missed it." HP hired KPMG to do due dilligence, so the actual question should be why KPMG missed it. I can understand why Leo didn't want to see it, he was so intent on building a vehicle to smack back at Larry, but what's KPMG's excuse?

      1. Thing

        Re: Based on what I know of Autonomy...

        "what's KPMG's excuse?"

        the man who did not want to see it signed their pay cheque so they told him what he wanted to hear.

        Have we not seen all this before with Anderson Consulting and Enron?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Based on what I know of Autonomy...

      Even if you assume everything HP is saying is the truth, which I don't... it seems to be a pass the blame attempt, we are talking about discrepancies in the millions of dollars. HP wrote off $8.8 billion. Are they honestly saying that, if not for Autonomy including hardware in IDOL's revenues and a few other minor things, the company would have been worth $8.8 billion more. The accounting claims, in total, probably equate to generously a billion dollars in valuation... so then it was a $7.8 billion overpayment. It is a question of magnitude. HP's problem is that even if Autonomy's books were without a comma out of place, they still over paid by several billion dollars, which is what everyone said the day they announced the acquisition.

    3. Barry Mahon
      Alert

      Re: Based on what I know of Autonomy...

      As someone who often had to go into organisations who had bought Autonomy and then discovered it didn't do what was on the tin, my major surprise is that took this long.

      Autonomy were well known in the information business as an outfit who sold gullible senior management the idea that funneling all your 'information' into Autonomy got you a lovely indexed and organised result. NO!

      What you got was a piece of expensive software and the requirement to buy sufficient paid for consultancy to make it seem to work. Sounds familiar? recognise the scam?? How many other software packs can you name that fit the bill??

      Autonomy was touted about for quite a while before HP bit it. The 'due diligence' would have looked at what Autonomy booked the revenues as, the sum of the software sale plus the counsultancy plus the addons, then added a sum for 'goodwill' leading to a $ big number and then add 'cloud' 'new market opening for HP' etc., etc. and your in the $bn stuff before you can draw breath.

      Finally, bear in mind that our friends in the banking community, those paragons of business acumen, lent HP the necessary funds..... and bingo.

  8. JeffyPooh
    Pint

    Good Test Equipment

    I think that they should get back to their core competency: audio oscillators.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Good Test Equipment

      They hived that off as Agilent didn't they?

      Now all they have are printer ink and pass through profits on PCs, plus the revolving door of titsup purchases of other companies.

      Should have given Agilent the HP name I always thought. But no one asked me.

      1. saundby
        Thumb Up

        Re: Good Test Equipment

        When they had a "name the new company" deal going at HP before it was split off, I turned in a sheet reading "Hewlett-Packard". They asked me, and I told them just what you would have. FWIW.

    2. saundby

      Re: Good Test Equipment

      Ah, that would be Agilent.

      Today, I deposited the money they sent me for owning some of their stock. I own three times as much HP, but all I expect from that is some "shoft lavatory paper" at this rate.

      Time to flush HPs board, at the very least.

    3. John Smith 19 Gold badge
      Pint

      Re: Good Test Equipment

      "I think that they should get back to their core competency: audio oscillators."

      That's a bit unfair.

      They made some nice GC/MS kit as well.

      And the calculators were pretty nice too.

      1. Chris Miller

        There are some excellent soft calculators

        My favourite is the HP-42S, which has finally made my physical HP-32S redundant after many years of faithful service. For the hardcore there's Droid48, but that suffers from the physical limitations of the real calculator, which supported so many functions that it required about 3 key presses to select each one.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Good Test Equipment

      "I think that they should get back to their core competency: audio oscillators."

      Depends how far you go back, doesn't it? Looks to me like HP's core competency for many years now has been board room revolving doors and payments for failure, over-paying for acquisitions, mismanaging both acquisitions and original core businesses, and destroying sharehoolder value.

      They really ought to get that written out in flowery langugage and put on their website as a "mission statement". Arguably they could talk about building shareholder value, so long as there is a footnote that says in small print "We mean other companies' shareholders"

  9. Tom 35

    I expect both are true.

    HP paid way too much for it.

    Then squeezed the life out of what they did get.

    Now they want to pass the blame.

  10. PTR

    It was blindingly obvious that they overpaid for it.

    Then HP did what HP do, take something that works, and totally destroy it.

    EDS

    Palm

    Autonomy

    etc

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      *cough*

      EDS worked?

  11. Ian Michael Gumby
    Boffin

    If true, Deloitte is SoL

    Anderson was felled by Enron.

    Delloite can be felled by this since they were the auditors.

    1. James Anderson
      Headmaster

      Re: If true, Deloitte is SoL

      Please it was "Arthur Andersen" (gotta defend the Clan Name!)

    2. Gordon 10

      Re: If true, Deloitte is SoL

      According to the rest of the commentards it was KPMG who did the due diligence.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: If true, Deloitte is SoL@Gordon 10

        "According to the rest of the commentards it was KPMG who did the due diligence."

        Well both are liable. But KPMG would "merely" be guilty of breach of contract/professional nedligence, but Deloitte would probably be accused of being complicit in fraud (in the event that the accounts were materially manipulated). Arthur Anderson collapsed because they were in the position that Deloitte's would be (if HP's pathetic whnings are true).

        Note that the audit market is now every bit as concentrated as it was at the time of Enron, so (for example) in the UK the smallest of the top 4 firms is about three times the size of the next nearest competitor. This means big listed companies almost always stick with a big four firm, so I can't see either KPMG or Deloitte going down on these accusations.

  12. Charles Smith

    They've got previous...

    EDS, Palm, Compaq, DEC, Tandem, Skype

    1. John Smith 19 Gold badge

      Re: They've got previous...

      Didn't Skype go to Microsoft?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: They've got previous...

        He's confusing Meg Whitman and HP. Meg ran ebay when they bought Skype, for reasons still unknown to everybody.

    2. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

      Re: They've got previous...

      DEC was bought by Compaq before Compaq was bought by HP.

  13. Charles Smith

    digging deeper

    Skype was a stella purchase by one of the cast members.

    I'm just reading http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/08/500-hp-apotheker/ it is a bit long, but quite an expose of the Dark Princes on the HP Board. Does the term necrophilia apply to this situation?

  14. Richard Jones 1
    Happy

    Due Diligence?

    If you have ever been involved in due diligence and seen how well it is received by those who want a deal, you would not be surprised at this one.

    The last one I did was over a very small outfit. I valued the company at something like < 4% of its existing debt to us. However someone wanted it (or wanted their friend to get out from under it) so it went ahead and we bought the operation, cleared the debt and paid over cash totalling more than the accumulated debt.

    We had to shut it down a matter of months later.

    My valuation representing its hard assets in terms of scrap metal turned out to be about right; it made the current crop of zombies look good.

  15. Why Not?
    Coat

    I just bought

    I have a shiny new HP printer, just found out it will cost me 5 - 10 times the purchase cost for consumables.

    Can I have my money back?

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Revenue Recognition

    This will turn out to be dodgy up-front revenue recognition on multi-year deals to inflate the value of the company.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HP

    My HP printer no longer works. Good money was paid for it a few years ago, and in expensive ink cartridges since. The electronics retailer in a wilful effort to mislead had led me to believe I could print out documents and photographs on it, or use it as a scanner (which it wont do as it thinks the ink cartridges are incompatible?). I performed a whole host of due diligence before purchase but when you're lied to, it's hard to find.

    Also, my HP touchpad no longer works. Good money was paid for it a few years ago, it turned out to be incompatible with Wine (Cabernet Sauvignon).

    Also, their brown sauce is rotten, however their BBQ sauce is nice, however despite the picture of the houses of parliament on the bottle, it is made in the Netherlands and not by some brummies.

    Therefore I want an US and UK authorities to investigate alleged misrepresentations about printer ability, touchpad compatibility and sauce of origin.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    BBC Interview

    Mike Lynch is flatly denying the allegations in this BBC video: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20412186

    If true, I think the auditors / advisers / banks should hand back HP their fees on both sides (ie. Autonomy's and HPs should be refunded to HP). If the UBS banker can go to jail for 7 years for a £1.4bn fraud, someone should go to jail for this if there is a case of fraud (perhaps not for 7 years though, it's quite a bit less).

  19. James Pickett
    Paris Hilton

    I'm all for the removal of glass ceilings, but you have to wonder why HP has gone into a tailspin under both Carly and Meg.

    It it was Paris, I could understand...

  20. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Pirate

    Interesting!

    Little birdie tells me the SFO have taken a look and not laughed the matter out the door. This will get interesting as Mike Lynch, former Mr Autonomy, is now a non-exec director at .... <drum roll!> .... the BBC! Won't do much for the Beeb's already battered image if a director gets sent down for fraud. Andrew Orlowski must be sharpening his pencil already....

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    " the Beeb's already battered image"

    @Matt

    Yesterday on BBC R4, news items on this subject mentioned that Lynch was on the BBC board.

    A bloke called Marcus Agius is also on the BBC board, and has been for a few years, and when he's not 'earning' the 50K/yr or thereabouts that the licencepayer pays him, he's the Chairman at Barclays.

    Now in all the BBC news coverage of Barclays (which has sometimes been a bit thin, especially when it was bad news) I've never heard them mention that the Chairman of Barclays was on the BBC board.

    On the other hand, Agius was reportedly asked questions about this at the Barclays AGM this year and apparently found himself rather embarrassed.

    Why the difference?

    Purely by coincidence, the BBC was one of the few UK news outlets that didn't offer much coverage of Barclays news re executive salaries and top-shelf bonuses a year or two back, at a time when even the Sun was covering it. Also little coverage of news relating to Barclays fondness for arranging taxdodging schemes.

    1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: " the Beeb's already battered image"

      "Why the difference?" Oh, no difference! Indeed, quite the opposite, I'd be most happy to see an exposure of the Beeb's directors and any patterns of light coverage. It's supposed to be independent, impartial and public-serving, so I beleive the board should be just as open to scrutiny. As a matter of point, exactly what great insight into television or radio media, reporting or entertainment production did having a Barclays Chairman bring? Is "media luvvie" on his CV? Enquiring minds and all that.

      1. Philip Lewis
        Big Brother

        Re: " the Beeb's already battered image"

        Such an inquiry would be quashed instantly under the "purposes of journalism" principle.

  22. LOW
    WTF?

    In the beginning....

    ...were a couple of fresh faced Cambridge graduates sitting in my office with a genuinely innovative and potentially very useful product. Their kit promised to be XML before XML was even a standard..

    I was working in a major international law firm with 4.5 million documents that were growing like billio (unsure of sp, there and can't be bothered to look it up before you commentards go at my spelling) and we needed a way to find how we'd constructed documents in previous deals n order to cut down our overheads in the future.

    I spent a long time with these guys, and they gave me a fabulous piece of search kit to play with for free. As it turned out, their stuff was rubbish for legal documents and we came to the conclusion that no amount of training (if you're not familiar with training software, think about training OCRs - it was basically the same scenario) would solve the problem.

    As it turned out, we came to the conclusion that Goldfarb and Prescod had got it right with SGML (which was created to handle IBM's legal documents, globally - for the non-initiated among you, XML is a direct sub-set of SGML and it handles legal documents rather well and, unlike SGML doesn't require a couple of years to learn) and, really, no amount of training would solve our problems. We really tried.

    To give you a specific idea of what the problems were, the word "service" is used in many different contexts in the legal world and none of us found a way of training an artificial intelligence machine to deal with that in a humane way - we just got junk in the search results. So, back to what's now called XPath and XPointer, I believe. It's been a while and this was "back in the day".

    However, using the same kit to search the internet pissed all over everything available (and it would put Google to shame today, IMHO). Fabulous stuff.

    After I'd done the research for them, they disappeared from the market and you couldn't buy their product unless you were a Rothschild funded government. Having spent over a year using Autonomy's kit on a daily basis, I was gutted when they pulled it from civilian life but did understand why it wasn't available to me any more.

    In my experience HP make great hardware but don't ask them to give you software - their software just ain't as good as the sauce we all know and love.

    HP really missed a trick there and more fool them. Autonomy came up with a brilliant game changer for searching in-homogenous data sets i.e. the internet and they are still a legend in my mind. Oh how I wish for a web search engine like that again.

    As for Google, bah, yank spyware pish full of advertising crap that I don't want to see. So I never use their engine that was designed to wow noobs and, as far as I'm concerned Google is still not mature enough for a serious researcher who needs to find facts now, for a business case. So in my mind, Google is 20 years behind the times. Twats.

    Oh remind me, what's Google's revenue model again? Oh yeah, the emperor's new clothes.

    1. Barry Mahon

      Re: In the beginning....

      I note you said "in previous deals" does that mean previous software or just documents from "deals" - cos if it is the former maybe you'd been trying others??

      I wonder was it after Autonomy bought Verity which, like many others, was a good search engine before Google, that you found Autonomy useful for general searching?.

      Google got there because they used a distributed model, still do, where the searching is paralleled, cutting down the time it takes. Google were also in the right place, the explosion of cheap server farms coupled with (relatively) lower priced comms.

      As I said in a previous post Autonomy required, as you noted, (paid for) training, You sound like an experienced information person. IMO, Lynch copped on that it was a lot easier to sell to people who didn't understand the information business, or worse, thought that the information business was crap and 'computers' could do it.....

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HP Board, shower of Bastards ?

    I really dont get what HP are up to. They are obviously incompetent at buying Autonomy at that price. But now get the lawyers in ? There is zero chance they will get any of the money back; the lawyers will cost more than they take ?

    Is the HP Board completely stupid or is this some plan to fend off activist investors from splitting the company up ?

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