HP waited until the markets had closed last night to announce their offer for Autonomy. The bid amounted to £7 billion and is a good indicator of where HP sees the technology world going. Autonomy specialises in software than can search unstructured email and instant messaging and produce results very similiar to the results you would get from searching structured information. The appeal to large corporates is that these tools can then be used to search data for compliance and legal purposes, such as corporate litigation, disputes with staff or exposing fraud. Autonomy believes acording to a report in The Daily Telegraph that 80% of data on the internet is unstructured.

You wouldn’t expect a business editor writing for The Telegraph to understand the technology strategy behind this acquistion but buried amongst the financial detail that needless to say has the journalists salivating is the comment that Hewlett-Packard may spin off it’s PC division and discontinue it’s TouchPad tablet. This is more radical than it looks when you consider that HP is the world’s largest computer manufacturer.

It could also signal a shift in emphasis to cloud computing and the infratructure that centralised services require. The emphasis with cloud based computing is on the speed of communication, business agility and security of your data. There is far less requirement for an old fashioned refresh of your desktop environment every 2-3 years. Therefore HP’s potential strategic change makes sense.

Here at Twin Systems we have always been hardware agnostic and believe that the key to the great service we deliver is the understanding of all elements of your network. Our focus on users has always been revolutionary and we have always believed that unless you have a team that understands how all the elements of your network work together then it will be impossible to deliver great service. It’s good to see that HP have caught up……!

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