Autonomy Corporation
Headquarters at Cambridge Business Park, pictured in 2011 | |
| Formerly | HP Autonomy (2011–2015) |
|---|---|
| Industry | Information technology |
| Founded | June 1996 (as Autonomy Corporation PLC) Cambridge, England, U.K. |
| Founder | Michael Lynch Richard Gaunt |
| Defunct | 2017 |
| Fate | Assets divided and later merged with Micro Focus and OpenText |
| Successor | OpenText |
| Headquarters | Cambridge, United Kingdom San Francisco, United States |
Area served | Global |
Key people | Robert Youngjohns (SVP & General Manager) |
| Products | Big data analytics, information governance, data protection and digital marketing |
Autonomy Corporation PLC was an enterprise software company founded in Cambridge, United Kingdom in 1996. The company developed and sold a variety of enterprise software, including for big data analytics, information governance, data protection, and digital marketing.
Autonomy was acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in October 2011, renaming it HP Autonomy. The deal valued Autonomy at $11.7 billion (£7.4 billion). Within a year, HP had written off $8.8 billion of Autonomy's value. HP claimed this resulted from "serious accounting improprieties" and "outright misrepresentations" by the previous management. The former CEO, Mike Lynch, said that the problems were due to HP's running of Autonomy.
HP recruited Robert Youngjohns, ex-Microsoft president of North America, to take over HP Autonomy in September 2012. In 2015, HP was split into HP Inc and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE); HP Autonomy assets were divided between them with HPE taking the larger part. HP Inc later sold its Autonomy content management assets to Canadian software company OpenText in 2016. In 2017, HPE sold its remaining Autonomy assets, as part of a wider deal, to the British software company Micro Focus. In 2023, OpenText acquired Micro Focus, and reunited the two halves of former Autonomy assets.