A slide about Autonomy posted by Oracle.

Did information technology just run afoul of disinformation technology?

The computing giants Oracle and Hewlett-Packard, known for trash talking each other and for fighting in court, took their sniping to the Internet on Wednesday when Oracle charged that the British software company Autonomy, which H.P. is buying for $10.2 billion, tried to sell itself to Oracle last April. Oracle said it was not interested, since the $6 billion market value Autonomy had at the time was still far more than Autonomy was worth.

The implication was that H.P. came in second, and is foolish, in buying Autonomy.

Oracle even posted a series of slides on its Web site that it said showed that Mike Lynch, Autonomy’s chief executive, intended to sell his company. The slides, Oracle said, were “all about Autonomy’s financial results, Autonomy’s stock price history, Autonomy’s Price/Earnings history and Autonomy’s stock market valuation.” Oracle also said Mr. Lynch showed up at the meeting with “Silicon Valley’s most famous shopper/seller of companies, the investment banker Frank Quattrone.”

Mysteriously, those slides, which were widely commented on in the industry press Thursday, were posted for only about 12 hours. Then they disappeared. A few hours later they were back. It seems there is less there than Oracle intended. Here’s what I learned.

Oracle continued to publish a page that said Mr. Lynch came by for talks with Mark Hurd, Oracle’s co-president, and Doug Kehring, who is in charge of mergers and acquisitions at Oracle. For his part, Mr. Lynch acknowledged the meeting, but said it was just a customer visit that Mr. Quattrone organized. Why he was meeting the head of mergers was not explained.

Upon request, Oracle sent The New York Times the slides, which it said were sent from Qatalyst Partners, the investment bank headed by Mr. Quattrone, not Autonomy, in January. That backs up Autonomy’s assertion that Oracle had lifted an older slide deck from Mr. Quattrone to make Mr. Lynch look bad — Mr. Quattrone wasn’t even working for Autonomy then.

So what is going on here? Did Mr. Lynch try to sell Autonomy to Oracle, or did Oracle post the story and slides to make H.P. look bad? This may be a little bit of both. Mr. Lynch did talk to Oracle’s head of M.A. before he took the H.P. deal, and Oracle’s cleverly worded description of the meeting makes it look as if he went into a lot more detail than he would like to admit. The deck looks like a bit of extra “evidence” that Oracle later withdrew.

Mr. Lynch probably set off Oracle’s outburst with his recent statements that Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive, was lying about whether Oracle’s software could do the same kinds of things Autonomy’s software. Not that it took a lot to get Oracle started: in the last year, Mr. Ellison has publicly criticized H.P.’s board for firing Mr. Hurd, his friend and tennis partner, and then hired Mr. Hurd himself. The hiring provoked H.P. to file a lawsuit against Mr. Hurd, which was quickly settled. Another lawsuit between H.P. and Oracle, over Oracle’s decision to discontinue software development on one of H.P.’s advanced chips, is still going on.

In between the lawsuits, Mr. Ellison said Léo Apotheker, Mr. Hurd’s replacement, conducted industrial espionage against Oracle when he was running SAP. (Though SAP settled that suit and admitted wrongdoing, it said Mr. Apotheker was not involved in the incidents.)

Only one thing is nearly certain in this name-calling mess: Meg Whitman, who took over at H.P. when Mr. Apotheker was fired last week, will not be on stage for hugs and camaraderie when Mr. Ellison kicks off Oracle’s big trade show in San Francisco on Sunday evening.

Or, as one observer involved in the cross-company slinging put it: “Oracle used Autonomy to give H.P. a poke in the eye. It just got ridiculous.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c89846c8bf583fb26f632397d3263974