The latest news from HP, that the board is supposedly going to fire Leo Apotheker after only eleven months in the job, and install Meg Whitman as the new CEO, is making me very nervous about my Autonomy shares.
I was flummoxed to receive a letter from my dealers stating that the first deadline for acceptances had passed with only 46% of holders accepting, since I had assumed that UK institutional investors, long famed on the boards for their apathy towards AU, would have cashed out at the first opportunity, especially since the offer is widely seen as being an overpayment. I guess the art of brinkmanship is not lost. We'll see, the next deadline is 3rd October, and I think there's another, final one on the 17th or thereabouts.
Gossip on the boards is frenzied right now, with some even speculating on an HP/SAP merger: the rationale being that if HP are indeed moving to be an enterprise software company, they would still lack a big-hitter product even after the AU purchase. SAP would, of course, fit that bill.
I think Larry Ellison would relish the role of Wicked Fairy at that particular wedding. I have no doubt that the M&A specialists at Oracle are even now casting their eyes over HP and running the numbers. A further fall in its share price (already down 47% since Leo came aboard), as might well accompany a bid for SAP, would only make it more vulnerable.
There are other attractions for Larry, besides the pure pleasure of sacking the HP board en masse and putting his mate Mark Hurd back in the CEO's seat. He bought Sun for Java, not for its hardware business, but the addition of HP's Unix server business (and the re-introduction of the Oracle database on those servers) would please HP's midrange customers and add to the critical mass of Oracle's Unix business. If the worst came to the worst, he could perhaps simply shift some proportion of HP customers over to Sun kit the hard way, by simply (over time) raising HP prices faster (even) than Sun's, but there's no need at all to be so cavalier. He could kill Itanium after the next two, contracted-for, revisions by simply failing to extend HP's contracts with Intel, and have HP engineers in the meantime scurry to port HP-UX to SPARC, while scheduling new Superdome SPARC cells for some time around 2015. Any remaining HP IP in Itanium might be a useful addition to SPARC, and increased volume couldn't hurt. If he's as neutral on Sun's x86 business as he says he is, he could complete the spinoff of HP's PC division while throwing in Sun's x86 business as a sweetener. What he'd do with WebOS is anyone's guess.
Well that's enough wild imaginings and uninformed speculation for one night.
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