Reference no: EM13521818

Hewlett-Packard
On November 20, 2012, Hewlett-Packard announced that it had taken an $8.8 billion accounting charge, after discovering "serious accounting improprieties" and "outright misrepresentations" at Autonomy, a British software maker that H.P. bought for $11.1 billion in the previous year. The news was a major setback for H.P., which has been struggling to turn around its operations and remake its business. The charge essentially wiped out its profit. In the latest quarter, H.P. reported a net loss of $6.9 billion, compared with a $200 million profit in the period a year earlier. The company said the improprieties and misrepresentations took place just before the acquisition, and accounted for the majority of the charges in the quarter.
The alarm bells started ringing less than a year after the technology company bought Autonomy in the summer of 2011. Unhappy with the business's sagging performance, H.P. ousted Mike Lynch, the software company's mercurial Cambridge-educated founder, and sent a team to England to review its books last May. It was then that a senior finance official at the British company stepped forward, raising questions about the accuracy of the numbers. But Mr. Lynch said his company's sales fell off a cliff after it merged with H.P. - not because it suddenly had to account for things legally, as H.P. claims, but because of institutional foot-dragging at H.P. The pattern of dysfunction at Autonomy that each side says the other fostered illustrates how hard it is for any two companies to fully understand each other before merging. It also calls into question whether what remains of Autonomy will quickly or easily deliver meaningful results.

Answer the following questions:
(1) In September 2010, HP completed its $2.35 billion merger with 3Par, just weeks after thwarting rival Dell in a bidding war for the storage vendor. 3Par's StoreServ Storage Platform has been HP's flagship product and a growth driver of HP's storage revenue since the merger. Why is the acquisition of 3Par a great success while the purchase of Autonomy is not? Briefly compare the health of the two target companies at the time of acquisition.