Shares in UK software house Autonomy soared 75% in morning trading on news of its planned £7 billion takeover by Hewlett-Packard.
The Autonomy board is recommending the HP offer of £25.50 in cash a share, a premium of around 64% on yesterday's closing price.
Founded in 1996 by Mike Lynch, Cambridge-headquartered Autonomy provides software for "unstructured" searches, helping companies "derive meaning and value from their information".
Among its customers are a raft of the world's biggest financial services firms, including Citi, Deutsche Bank, Lloyds and the New York stock Exchange.
Lynch will continue to lead the business, which will operate as a separate unit, from Cambridge and there are "currently no plans" for job cuts among its 2700 staff.
"From our foundation in 1996, we have been driven by one shared vision: to fundamentally change the IT industry by revolutionising the way people interact with information. Autonomy with the platform to bring our world-leading technology and innovation to a truly global stage, making the shift to a future age of the information economy a reality," says Lynch.
The deal signals a dramatic shift from hardware to software for HP, which is also giving up on mobile and tablets and could even ditch its personal computers division, either in a sale or spin-off.