HP may spin off PC business, may buy UK’s Autonomy for $10 bn

Hewlett-Packard (HP), the world's largest PC maker, is in talks to buy UK-based software company Autonomy Corp for about $10 billion and also spin off its personal-computer business, Bloomberg reported yesterday, citing people with direct knowledge of the matter.

HP could announce plans as early as today, when the company is scheduled to report its quarterly earnings, the report said.

The Palo Alto, California-based company has denied in the past media speculation that it plans to spin off or sell  its personal-computer business, the world's largest and one of its biggest divisions but also one of the least profitable.

Cambridge-based Autonomy, which has Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Nestle and the US Securities and Exchange Commission and 20,000 others as its clients, is the second-largest software company in Europe.

Autonomy was founded by researchers at Cambridge University and specialises in a variety of enterprise search and knowledge management applications using adaptive pattern recognition techniques, which can make sense of complex, unstructured information such as emails and phone calls.

The company, which has made six acquisitions since its founding in 1996, reported net income of $217 million on revenues of $870 million last year and had revenue of $256 million in the second quarter this year.