How would you feel if you were called a liar on Oracle’s website?

Meet two companies – Oracle and Autonomy.

A lot of you will probably have heard of Oracle but probably less of you have heard of Autonomy.

Oracle is a business software and hardware systems company whilst Autonomy develops search software.

Oracle’s Chief Executive is Larry Ellison and Autonomy’s Chief executive is Mike Lynch.

Interestingly enough Oracle’s CEO has recently accused Mr Lynch of lying or in his words of telling “whoppers”.

So, what’s the story behind all of this?

The story began a couple of weeks ago when Oracle’s Elison said that he thought Hewlett Packard had overpaid when they had paid £7bn to buy Autonomy and that Mike Lynch from Autonomy had earlier this year offered to sell Autonomy to Oracle but Oracle had turned it down as they felt it was too much.

Autonomy’s Lynch then said that any discussion of him talking to Oracle about them purchasing Autonomy was “inaccurate”.

Now the previous sentence is quite important as seeing that Autonomy was quoted on the London Stock Exchange, if there was any kind of sales process taking place then Autonomy were required to notify the Stock Exchange about it.

No such notification took place.

After Mr Lynch said that any talk of him discussing a potential sale to Oracle was inaccurate, Oracle responded in quite a dramatic way.

They posted a statement on their website (with the nice webpage address of Oracle.com/PleaseBuyAutonomy) and they didn’t hold back.

Amongst other things, they released PowerPoint slides of the meeting that Mr Lynch attended and the Oracle statement is entitled “Another Whopper from Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch”.

The statement then goes onto say amongst other things:

“Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch continues to insist that Autonomy was never ‘shopped’ to Oracle.  But now at least he remembers and admits to meeting with Oracle President Mark Hurd and Doug Kehring, Oracle’s head of M&A, this past April.  But CEO Lynch insists that it was a purely technical meeting, limited to a ‘lively discussion of database technologies.’  Interesting, but not true.  The slides Lynch showed Oracle’s Mark Hurd and Doug Kehring were all about Autonomy’s financial results, Autonomy’s stock price history, Autonomy’s Price/Earnings history and Autonomy’s stock market valuation.  Ably assisting Mike Lynch’s attempt to sell Autonomy to Oracle was Silicon Valley’s most famous shopper/seller of companies, the legendary investment banker Frank Quattrone.  After the sales pitch was over, Oracle refused to make an offer because Autonomy’s current market value of $6 billion was way too high.

We have put Mike Lynch’s PowerPoint slide sales-pitch up on the Oracle website – Oracle.com/PleaseBuyAutonomy – with the hope Mike Lynch will recognize his slides, his memory will be restored, and he will recall what he and Frank Quattrone discussed during their visit to Oracle last April. Yesterday, the Autonomy CEO did not remember having any meeting with Oracle.  Today, he remembers the April meeting and inaccurately describes how it came about and what was discussed.

The Statement continued but the key message appears to be that the two individuals are probably not the best of friends and somehow I don’t think the two CEOs will be sending each other Christmas cards this year.