The UK's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is investigating the sale of technology firm Autonomy to Hewlett Packard, according to a filing from HP.

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But when she visited London, the focus was bound to be on one of the worst decisions HP has ever made - its acquisition of the British technology firm Autonomy in 2011.

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But in a lecture on what he's learned about innovation, Mike Lynch - who's the founder of another Cambridge technology success story, Autonomy - bemoaned the fact that all the brilliant work done by the university's scientists had failed to translate into many big hitters in the FTSE-100.

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But, unlike many of the technology companies that had gone to market in the boom, Autonomy was actually profitable.

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But the main reason HP paid a 64% premium for its shares seems to be that it believes that Autonomy's technology could be turned into a platform to help companies make sense of their ever-growing pile of data.

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Mr Lynch founded software company Autonomy as a small start-up and turned into one of the UK's largest technology companies.

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"We've just got to the point where the technology really starts to work, " says Michael Lynch, chief executive of Autonomy Corp.

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In addition to Blinkx, Autonomy counts the U.S. and U.K. governments as customers of its speech-recognition technology.

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The transaction also included a formidable list of organizations representing Autonomy, starting with Qatalyst Partners, an investment bank headed by Frank Quattrone specializing in technology companies.

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