Autonomy slams Oracle's 'Lynch tells whoppers' claim

Autonomy has firmly rejected Oracle's claims it really was shopping itself to Oracle, saying Oracle needs help with its unstructured data, and Autonomy could help.

We can't say it any better than Autonomy's statement so here it is for your enjoyment:

Last week in response to a question about unstructured information Oracle made some less-than-enlightened comments on the subject, which Autonomy has been pointing out in the press. Now, as an attempt at diversion from their poor positioning, Oracle has raised the issue of whether Autonomy was “shopped by its management team” to them.

In April 2011, there was a meeting for approximately thirty or forty minutes between Autonomy and Mark Hurd, which was set up by Frank Quattrone as an introduction to Mark Hurd. Oracle is an Autonomy customer. It was made clear that Autonomy was not for sale and no sale process was under way. Mr. Quattrone's company was not engaged by Autonomy at that time. There has been no other contact with Oracle since then.

It may well be that investment banks were independently recommending Autonomy as an acquisition target to industry players – that is standard practice for - but this would not have been at our behest. Qatalyst have informed us that the slides Oracle has recently posted on its website were prepared and sent independently by Qatalyst to Oracle on 26 January (the content is clearly from January). This is the first time we have seen them. Autonomy was not involved in this nor was Qatalyst engaged by Autonomy until mid-year. Autonomy did not present these slides in the meeting.

Oracle seems a little confused about the sequence of events and origins of the data it has received, something that would suggests it needs better management of and insight into the unstructured data on its internal systems. We would be delighted to help.

Oh deary, deary me. ®