Re: Sounds like there might be something here
"If you are a software company then selling hardware related to hosting your software on-premise or in your own DC either for processing , storage or networking (appliance) would seem valid, just reselling pure hardware which is un-connected to your core business that makes up 10-20 percent of your overall revenue and not making that clear when reporting sales figures smells like inflating numbers and looks bad to me."
Two points:
- the case is around improper accounting practices. As long as the hardware sales were accounted for correctly in Autonomy's systems, I'm unclear how HP's "we thought they were just a software company" argument will go. If the accounting records were correct, this should have become clear during due diligence rather than being discovered by HPE over the next 6-9 months.
- in terms of licence based software deals using hardware, Autonomy's platforms required significant resources to do analyse unstructured data, so that may have weighted large software deals towards large initial hardware installs relative to the software licences, particularly if new applications are being deployed across an organisation and you don't want to pay for software that may be 1-2 years away from being usable as you integrate it into existing systems.
HP are conveniently painting this issue as very black and white (shock, horror - a software company is moving hardware) when they have to prove Autonomy's accounting practices did not comply with applicable financial regulations. I think it may even go further than that in that HP may also need to prove their witnesses were not the source of the alleged fraud if they want to win the case against Lynch.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
