Autonomy misled HP about finances, Hewlett Packard says

I worked for a company that was Acquired by Autonomy. They made us fire a large portion of our staff before the final papers were signed so that they could continue with their claims that they never fired people as the result of an acquisition.<p>Slimy Bastards if you ask me. This does not surprise me in the least.

Wasn't Autonomy a public company when HP acquired it ? Was it not the responsibility of HP board and management and their investment bankers to do due diligence before they made such a big acquisition ?<p>Could it be that HP management , having lost the position of largest PC maker to Lenovo, is looking to throw our attention away from their incompetence.

"We did a whole host of due diligence but when you're lied to, it's hard to find," Are you kidding me? That's the whole purpose of doing due diligence in the first place.

&#62; Autonomy founder Mike Lynch is a non-executive director of the BBC.<p>Way to go journalistic impartiality at the BBC.

This surely will hurt the reputation of Lynch. The other news reports have quotes saying in effect this was perpetrated by senior management and that the whistleblower who came forward is still at HP/Autonomy, which by inference seems to point a rather stern finger at Lynch.

I have no comment on Autonomy's finances. We did however evaluate it's product vs Google's search appliance.<p>The Google Appliance we pretty much plugged in and let it do it's thing. After a few days it was giving excellent results on our massive (80,000 people) company intranet.<p>The Autonomy server had to be constantly tweaked and fiddled with to even get it near to the relevance of the results.<p>Unfortunately, Autonomy had flogged a loads of licenses to another part of the business for peanuts, so we had to go with their inferior product.