The transaction is valued at approximately $8.8 billion, and a majority stake will be owned in part by HPE shareholders.
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The deal requires antitrust approval and is expected to close in the third quarter.
“We believe the software assets that will be a part of this combination will bring better value to both our customers and shareholders as part of a more focused software company committed to developing these businesses on a standalone basis”.
HPE includes the assets of Autonomy, the United Kingdom software company that HP bought from entrepreneur Mike Lynch in a controversial deal in 2011.
California-headquartered enterprise IT solutions provider, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co (NYSE:HPE), reported fiscal third quarter (FQ3) results today.
Other private equity firms that made offers for the software assets include Vista Equity Partners Management, Carlyle Group and TPG Capital, the people said. “Software is still a key to our core mission and strategy”.
The deal makes Micro Focus one of the UK’s biggest tech companies, with annual revenues of about £3.4bn.
While its PC sales appeared to show little to get excited about, some industry analysts said the company’s PC business was heading in the right direction. Micro Focus will continue to be listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Meanwhile the $US74 billion merger of Dell and EMC has been completed, with no word on the long term fate of the EMC Enterprise Content Division (ECD), including Documentum, InfoArchive and the new LEAP cloud apps. Excluding one-time items, HPE earned 49 cents a share, topping the 44 cents a share forecast by analysts in a Thomson Reuters survey.
A serial acquirer of software platforms, Micro Focus has also shifted strategy to buying higher growth software such as SUSE, the world’s No.2 maker of Linux software while wringing the most out of aging software.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced on Wednesday that it’s offloading its non-core software assets, including its Application Delivery Management, Big Data, Enterprise Security, Information Management & Governance and IT Operations Management businesses.
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In addition to the software assets deal, the pair are also planning a commercial partnership to bolster development in areas such as cloud computing, Micro Focus said.
