Bloomberg Businessweek USA - 09.03.2020

18

Edited by

Jeff Muskus and

Rebecca Penty

Bloomberg Businessweek March 9, 2020

and, in 2011, wrote a $10.3 billion check to buy it.

That was validation not only for Britain’s “Silicon

Fen” but also for Mike Lynch, the University of

Cambridge graduate with a Ph.D. in mathematical

computing who founded Autonomy in 1996. After

building it into the country’s second-biggest soft-

ware company, he personally made $815 million

from Autonomy’s sale. The adulation quickly turned

to scandal, however, for both HP and Lynch.

In 2012, HP wrote down the vast majority of the

deal and alleged that Lynch had orchestrated a mas-

sive accounting fraud to dress Autonomy up for a

sale. The company says it wants $5 billion in dam-

ages from Lynch and Sushovan Hussain, Autonomy’s

finance director. But the nine-month, £40  mil-

lion ($51 million) U.K. civil trial—among the longest

and most expensive in modern British history—has

painted an unflattering picture of the American cor-

poration, full of infighting and internal skulduggery,

documented in dueling emails and testimony from

top HP executives. When HP split in two in 2015,

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE), the half that

kept the AI division under former Chief Executive

Officer and EBay Inc. legend Meg Whitman, contin-

ued the legal fight against Lynch.

Back when everyone still said “big data” instead

of “machine learning,” the U.K.’s Autonomy

Corp. considered itself an early leader in sorting

and analyzing huge troves of information about

online behavior, from video views to Facebook

likes. Hewlett-Packard  Co. thought so too

● HP and successor HPE

have spent almost a decade

trying to recoup $5 billion from

entrepreneur Mike Lynch over a

bad takeover

When a Tech

Giant Goes

To Court

T E C H N O L O G Y