Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced the sale of its software division to Micro Focus International. The deal, worth $8.8 billion, was announced by HPE yesterday afternoon alongside quarterly earnings figures. This comes shortly after the sale of HPE’s business services division to CSC back in May.
This deal, in practice a merger of the division and its new owner, is the last in a long line of acquisitions by Micro Focus that has turned it into one of the UK’s largest technology companies. It replaced ARM Holdings on the FTSE100 only last week after ARM’s $31 billion acquisition by Softbank of Japan. Micro Focus’s move marks one of the largest acquisitions by UK companies in recent years and a change from the post-Brexit dialogue on UK businesses being moved overseas. Investors have reacted positively to the news, with the share price of Micro Focus up by almost 20% in yesterday’s trading.
This latest sale sees HPE relinquish its remaining assets from HP’s controversial acquisition of Autonomy in 2011. Frost & Sullivan Digital Transformation Analyst Vijay Michalik comments: “Since its spin-off from the larger HP conglomerate in 2015, Meg Whitman’s HPE have been refocusing their strategy on key enterprise technologies in storage, network technology and services“. CEO Meg Whitman believes that HPE’s integration of computation, storage and networking components gives them a key advantage over their competitors Dell Technologies and Cisco Systems.
Comment by Vijay Michalik, Digital Transformation Team, Frost & Sullivan
