Bloomberg is reporting that Hewlett-Packard will dump -- er, spin out its PC business. At the same time, Bloomberg says HP will buy database and analytics vendor Autonomy for $10 billion. If this report is true, prepare for a major shift in the tech business and an acceleration of the "consumerized IT" trend in which business users increasingly drive technology adoption and usage -- and traditional IT moves further and further into the back office.
HP later confirmed it was considering both options -- and was discontinuing its WebOS-based tablets and smartphones.
On the face of it, such moves would mirror what IBM did in 2004 when it sold its PC business to Lenovo to concentrate on its software and services business. That shocked the industry, and IBM suffered a while as it made the transition to a vendor focused on the back end of business, not people's desktops. But the strategy proved very effective, as PCs got more and more commoditized and letting go of them allowed IBM to venture where the profits were.
The Autonomy buy -- if that happens -- would signal not just more momentum for HP in the back office but for the kind forward-looking technology that is a key driver today: smart, contextual analytics. IBM, Oracle, and SAP bought traditional business intelligence vendors a few years back (Cognos, Hyperion, and Business Objects, respectively) to add old-school historic analysis and reporting tools to their ERP systems. But the strategic action today is in looking forward, not backward, so technologies such as Autonomy's contextual search better fit that direction. Big data, semantic analysis, analysis of unstructured data, social sentiment analysis -- all that is about growing the business, and Autonomy plays more in that contextual space than the competitors do.
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http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-discovery/what-it-means-if-hp-dumps-its-pc-business-170226
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