#HPE, the enterprise portion of a reconfigured Hewlett-Packard, last week revealed plans to sell #Vertica, Autonomy and other software products to U.K.-based mainframe development house #MicroFocus in what the two companies valued as an $8.8 billion deal. The HPE software sell-off came on the heels of recent updates to Vertica analytics software that saw increased support for open source #Hadoop and #Spark integrations. Autonomy, with longstanding unstructured data analytics packages, represents the bigger and more controversial part of the transaction. HPE's Autonomy purchase gained a place in the annals of troubled purchases for HPE and beyond. In 2011, what was called #HP spent $11 billion to buy Autonomy, but after the fact, the company loudly contended it was snookered in the deal. Removing Autonomy and other software from the portfolio enables HPE to pursue its goal to become a ''faster-growing, higher-margin and stronger free cash-flowing organization,'' according to HPE CEO Meg Whitman. It also would close HPE's book on Whitman's CEO predecessor Leo Apotheker's widely panned Autonomy acquisition. Removing Vertica analytics from the ledger is a different matter. Through several years, it has earned repeated praise from Whitman as a growth-oriented product within HPE. But the analytics market in which Vertica now finds itself is a difficult one. It is a market heavily disrupted by open source software, such as #Apache #Hadoop and #Spark, as well as cloud computing.
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