False IDOL claims reach High Court: Lynch mob launched 'new' SPE Autonomy product to fake sales, says HPE Former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch oversaw the launch of what was purported to be a new product line in order to fraudulently pad its revenues, HPE’s lawyers have alleged. In 2009 Autonomy unveiled its Structured Probabilistic Engine, SPE. This was an extension of the Brit biz's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) product, an …
HPE alleges that far from being a groundbreaking new product, “the launch of SPE was a pretense,” and that it was “merely a repositioning of existing IDOL functionality” to help Autonomy artificially swell its sales figures to make it seem more successful than it really was.
I thought this was a standard marketing/sales techniques for enterprise software (amongst others) companies? I learn something new every day.
But but but but.....HPE does sell software....and some of the HPOV/HPSM software upgrades former employers have paid for appears to fit this description perfectly...
I will be disappointed if the next Autonomy case update doesn't include one or more members of HP's legal team being injured by a gigantic falling iron.
Unfortunately the great mass of evidence being presented is only tangentially relevant to the very simple core question of whether HP made a mistake or Mike Lynch fraudulently misled them. The way that English law works is that everyone has to present every single little piece of evidence that they think is even marginally relevant to whether the sale was fraudulent and if so exactly how much HP was defrauded of. This means weeks and weeks if minor drivel that may effect the level of damages since they aren't allowed to try the simple "is it fraud or not as a separate issue. Having taken part in such a case in the past I'm willing to bet that the judge understands the evidence better than the barristers involved and some of it will sufficiently specialist that they will repeatedly make fools of themselves with plenty of unintended comedy in court.
It is up to the court to decide whether evidence is relevant or not, and the only way for the court to decide that is to hear the evidence. It can't make a decision on evidence it hasn't seen as to whether it is relevant or not.
It needs to know so it knows whether or not it needed to know.
Unfortunately the great mass of evidence being presented is only tangentially relevant to the very simple core question of whether HP made a mistake or Mike Lynch fraudulently misled them.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
We know that HP management did some very bizarre things (to put it politely). We (commentards) said so at the time. But that's not the core question on which this court has to decide.
"But that's not the core question on which this court has to decide."
There are three questions - whether fraud was committed, who was involved/responsible for the fraud and the scale of the fraud committed.
So far around $10m of fraud has been identified
We are waiting to see how HP link Lynch into the fraud. And if they don't link it to Lynch, who do they link it to?
So far, there's no hint of how HP plan to get the fraud from $10m upto $5bn...
So big company H can sue the remnants of big company A for kidding the world about their latest wares, but nobody's suggesting that punter D should be able to do likewise. I've restocked the popcorn, but confess I haven't HAD any yet because the entertainment factor has begun to lag. In California terms ....
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