HP which was founded in a garage in Silicon Valley and for many years was the major IT player in the Bay Area - and/or gave birth to so many others viz Intel, Oracle, SUN Microsystems, Cisco, eBay, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Netscape (once the largest IPO ever in 1995) - has made an offer to buy Autonomy, a UK software solutions company founded in 1996. This would be a sea-change for HP. With Google buying Motorola Mobiles more IT consolidation is bound to happen during the rest of 2011.