Mr Lynch founded software company Autonomy as a small start-up and turned into one of the UK's largest technology companies.
He is the most prominent casualty of the acquisition of British software company Autonomy, much of the value of which has now been written off.
When the company assessed Autonomy before the acquisitions, the financial results appeared to pass muster.
Its webOS announcement was made in conjunction with news that it may acquire a software company called Autonomy and that it is considering spinning off its PC business.
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Ms. Whitman said Tuesday the company relied on Autonomy's regular auditor Deloitte and had hired KPMG for an additional review before the deal closed.
Any English company thinking of taking over Autonomy would have gone through the books with a fine toothed comb before handing over a penny.
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Autonomy is a British company that was not listed recently on any US exchange.
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To foster creativity and individuality, each of the company's 36 brands has design autonomy.
Blinkx's technology comes from U.K.-based enterprise-software vendor Autonomy (with which the company shares a San Francisco office).
This time, it was Autonomy, an acquisition that the company now admits was made without proper due diligence as it introduces claims of fraud.
At least one year before the H-P acquisition, an Autonomy executive brought concerns about the company's accounting practices to U.S. regulators including the SEC, according to people familiar with the matter.
We also do not understand why HP is raising these issues now given that Autonomy reported into the HP Finance team from the day the acquisition completed in October 2011, there was an extensive due diligence process and Autonomy was audited as a public company for many years.
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The former head of Autonomy, Mike Lynch, who is also a non-executive director of the BBC, has rejected HP's claims that former Autonomy management misled them as to the company's value.
Mike Lynch, Autonomy CEO, then publically denied that his company had been shopped to Oracle.
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"Toshiba is a good company in the sense that they give middle managers enough autonomy to do such things, " Masuoka says.
Other departures from HP in recent months include former webOS guru Sam Greenblatt, security sales leader Alan Kessler, Autonomy founder and CEO Mike Lynch (whose company was acquired by HP and whose accounting practices are currently under a legal microscope), and developer relations specialist Richard Kerris.
Oddly, though this is supposed to be part of the new core mission, Autonomy is going to be run as a separate company.
This appears to have been a willful effort on behalf of certain former Autonomy employees to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company in order to mislead investors and potential buyers.
Apart from the new problem at Autonomy and the series of leadership changes at HPQ, the computer company has also been plagued by losses and declines in revenue.
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No due diligence in the acquisition of a Compaq or an Autonomy can ultimately serve the shareholders absent this very basic sense of what the company is all about.
The company may experience lower revenues related to software and services due to the alleged fraud by Autonomy, which may have misrepresented the size of its business and consequentially the potential growth opportunity for HP and we will keep a close watch on this division in 2013.
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At the same time, the new leadership must address the acquisition and integration of Autonomy another strategic mistake in my opinion as it will pit the company against three major competitors, Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), and IBM (NYSE:IBM).
Dr Lynch, of course, eventually sold Autonomy to America's Hewlett Packard and is now embroiled in a row over just what his company was really worth.
Underlying all the mistakes of which Autonomy is the latest example, there has been the persistent inability of the board to actually define the company it manages.
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