The board of Cambridge, UK-based Autonomy has unanimously recommended its shareholders accept a £7.1 billion offer from technology giant HP.
Founded in 1996, Autonomy provides infrastructure software to a customer base of more than 25,000 companies, law firms and public sector agencies globally. It has approximately 2,700 employees worldwide.
Over the past five years, Autonomy has grown its revenues at a rate of approximately 55 per cent and its adjusted operating profit at a rate of approximately 83 per cent per annum.
The company has a firm foothold in the $20 billion global enterprise information management sector, which is growing at eight per cent annually. IDC recently recognised Autonomy as having the largest market share and fastest growth in the worldwide search and discovery market.
California-based HP said that Autonomy offers solutions that are synergistic across HP’s enterprise offerings and strengthens its capabilities for data analytics, the cloud, industry capabilities and workflow management, which will bolster HP’s cloud offerings with key assets for information management and data analytics.
The US company also said that Autonomy complements its existing offerings from enterprise servers, storage, networking, software, services and its Imaging and Printing Group (IPG).
Commenting, Dr. Mike Lynch, chief executive officer and founder of Autonomy, said: “This is a momentous day in Autonomy’s history. From our foundation in 1996, we have been driven by one shared vision: to fundamentally change the IT industry by revolutionizing the way people interact with information.
“HP shares this vision and provides Autonomy with the platform to bring our world-leading technology and innovation to a truly global stage, making the shift to a future age of the information economy a reality.”
Léo Apotheker, HP president and chief executive officer, added: “Autonomy presents an opportunity to accelerate our strategic vision to decisively and profitably lead a large and growing space. Autonomy brings to HP higher value business solutions that will help customers manage the explosion of information.
“Together with Autonomy, we plan to reinvent how both unstructured and structured data is processed, analyzed, optimized, automated and protected. Autonomy has an attractive business model, including a strong cloud based solution set, which is aligned with HP’s efforts to improve our portfolio mix.”
Following the acquisition, Autonomy will operate separately to HP, with Lynch set to remain at its helm.
