Introducing Micro Focus: Britain's new tech titan after £6.6bn Hewlett Packard deal

The Newbury based outfit is making some noise, but does this mean the British tech tide is turning?

Autonomy boss Mike Lynch: His company is now back home with Micro Focus (Matt LLoyd / Rex Features)

JUST when you thought British tech was dead, along comes another company nobody’s heard of to prove the doubters wrong.

Less than a month after iPhone chip designer ARM Holdings agreed to be taken over by Japan’s SoftBank, Newbury based Micro Focus has moved into the Premiership.

The software outfit has doubled in size by market value and nearly trebled its revenues through a deal with lumbering US computer giant Hewlett Packard.

The UK company is acquiring a bunch of assets including those of another British outfit that once aspired to be a top tech dog before getting gobbled up: Autonomy.

That deal went sour quicker than a pint of milk left out in the Sarah Desert, with HP writing down the company’s value by 75 per cent and indulging in a war of writs and of words with Mike Lynch, Autonomy’s former boss and founder.

The bits of the old Autonomy and other things Micro Focus is getting aren’t very fashionable.

But unloved assets like the ones HP is dumping are the focus of Micro Focus, which keeps a keen eye on the bottom line.

The Government might be inclined to use this deal as evidence that the UK tech sector is alive and well after ARM, but this shouldn’t be seen as a turning of the tide, or anything like it.

Micro Focus gets props for pulling off a £6.6bn deal. You’ll start to hear more about the company if it continues down its current path because it will rapidly rise up the FTSE 100 leaderboard.

But there’s a big difference between buying people’s unloved assets and making them work better and actually throwing off new and exciting companies like the Americans in Silicon Valley and the Chinese and the other top tech nations do.

The UK is not in that category. It’s not even close. It would be dishonest of ministers to suggest otherwise.