Enterprise SW Sales Count
Back when HO was doing $500 million in SW sales they asked me why I didn'[t cover them. I suggested that SW was such a tny part of their mix (less tha 1%), that I could not imagine what I'd say. Many years later they're up to $3 Billion -- still a pretty small percentage.
I have no idea what they thought they'd do with Autonomy, any more than I could understand why they bought Palm and then did nothing with it. SW deals are notoriously hard to integrate whicih is why they should be carefully selected and meticuously planned. (Note: IBM is very clever at this; they like to buy IBM Partners whom they already know well and whose software is oftn "pre-integrated.")
But if you're an nterprise vendor with the cash and the management bandwidth required, this is a grea time for acquisitions, especially enterprise cloud software which costs much more to bring to market and to evolve than most startups (exempt Workday) plan on.
We'd all like HP to return o its former glories, but depending on it's old PC business won't be the way. They need to look at Dell which is rapidly swappping PC's for services growth.