In a statement that seems not to have circulated as an official press release, but was emailed to a few U.K.-based tech journalists such as Chris Mellor at the Register, Lynch gives a more detailed account of the real reason for his “trip to SF” and his meeting in April with Oracle president Mark Hurd.

On one of my trips to SF (April 2011), Frank Quattrone, whom I have known for a long time, offered to introduce me to Mark Hurd. Oracle was a customer and I have never met him, so it was a good opportunity. Frank does this from time to time on my visits, he has introduced me to many people… NOTE: Frank was not engaged by Autonomy and there was no process running. The company was not for sale. I recall meeting with Mark and someone else I believe called Doug. At the start of the meeting they joked that Frank was there to sell them something. Frank and I made it clear that was not the case. We then met and had a lively discussion about database technologies. The meeting lasted approximately 30 mins. Frank is happy to confirm this.

Oracle’s corporate communications department, working unusually late, issued a retort that crossed the wires sometime after 1 am ET, calling Lynch’s statement “another whopper.”

It was no “lively discussion of database technologies,” Oracle says. Why bring two PowerPoint decks all devoted to Autonomy’s financial performance? Oracle, making good on last night’s implied threat to publish the decks, did so, and you can see them for yourself below.

Oracle published the slides in hope, it says, of restoring Lynch’s memory of a meeting he initially said never took place. “Yesterday, the Autonomy CEO did not remember having any meeting with Oracle,” the company said. “Today, he remembers the April meeting and inaccurately describes how it came about and what was discussed. Tomorrow, he will need to explain his slides.”

The kerfuffle is over Lynch’s defense of a comment Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made on a conference call with analysts last week. Asked about the current buzzword “unstructured data” and Oracle’s capabilities around it, Ellison engaged in his favorite hobby and took a jab at Hewlett-Packard — which last month said it would acquire Autonomy in a deal valued at $11.7 billion. “Autonomy was a shock to us. We looked at the price and thought it was absurdly high. We had no interest in making the Autonomy acquisition,” he said then.

He also went on to say that unstructured data can readily be added to Oracle’s existing database technology. “We think we’re much better off with a couple of smaller acquisitions and to continue to innovate in that area, so that the unstructured data and the structured data both find their way into an Oracle Database,” he said.

That, of course, didn’t sit well with Lynch, who has so far quietly endured criticism that HP is overpaying for Autonomy. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he denied that Autonomy was ever shopped to Oracle, and characterized Ellison’s understanding of the unstructured data problem as “very weak.”

Those, of course, were fighting words to Oracle, which decided to remind him of his April meeting with Hurd and Oracle’s M&A head Douglas Kehring.

It’s also helpful to remember that late last year Autonomy was being mentioned as the target of a bidding war between Oracle and Microsoft, according to a rumor-based story planted in the U.K.’s Daily Mail. Though such stories based on “takeover chatter” occur practically every day, someone with some skin in the game clearly wanted the markets to think Oracle was kicking Autonomy’s tires.

Lynch, of course, is really a proxy for HP’s new CEO Meg Whitman and Chairman Ray Lane, who have to get the Autonomy deal done and live with the price that former CEO Léo Apotheker agreed to pay for it. I asked Whitman about it last week, and she said “It is what it is.” The most interesting thing that has emerged from all this, however, is that Oracle claims to have considered Autonomy overpriced at a $6 billion valuation. HP paid almost twice that. Game on.

Autonomy Presentation 1 503341

Autonomy Presentation 2 503342

Then word came, via AllThingsD, that something big was coming from the board of directors. And as AllThingsD first reported (again), HP directors made one of their own, Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO who had become a director earlier this year, the new CEO. Léo Apotheker resigned, but don’t cry for him, because according to his contract, he made out rather well. Even before it was made official, investors applauded the move, sending HP shares skyward.

Analysts did what they always do, and, well, analyzed. And though it looked more like drama criticism, it’s not as if HP hasn’t known boardroom dramas before. Finally, the deed was done, meaning it was time to hold a conference call, but not before talking first to Kara Swisher of AllThingsD.

I got to talk to Whitman and HP Chairman Ray Lane yesterday, too, but I had to wait until after the conference call. With so many critics screaming that Whitman has no experience running an enterprise hardware company — and let’s be honest, there aren’t that many who do — I asked her to elaborate on the defense, made on the conference call with analysts, that her experience as a buyer of enterprise technology, during her years as CEO at eBay, provided important experience that will help her be an effective CEO at HP. I also asked about Autonomy, the British software firm that HP is in the process of acquiring for $10 billion, and how it will fit within HP; about the company’s plans for cloud services; and about the state of the HP brand amid all the corporate mishegas that has unfolded in the last several months.

AllThingsD: Meg, the main criticism of you, since you’ve been named CEO of HP, is that your primary experience before was at eBay, which is a consumer-facing company. The response on yesterday’s conference call has been that at eBay you were a purchaser of a lot of enterprise technology and that this gives you some important relevant experience. I get the point, but could you elaborate on it a bit? How does having been an enterprise buyer help you be HP’s CEO?

Whitman: What HP needs now more than anything else is management skills, communication skills and a commitment to executional excellence, all of which I know well, and are sort of core competencies from my 35-year career in business. I know technology because I ran a company whose very existence would not have been possible without it, and was a very significant buyer of technology products. And so that brings me a unique buyer’s perspective. But I have not spent 35 years in the enterprise business. Add so what that means is that I will be relying heavily on Dave Donatelli; on Todd Bradley; on the senior executives at HP; and also, frankly, on Ray Lane, who was at Oracle for many years, and EDS, and who knows this space well. So I think what customers will get is that one plus one equals three.

Lane: I agree with that. What we need here, and what we didn’t have before, is operational execution, communication skills, getting the team on the same page and leading them. The CEOs of $130 billion companies are not leading the technology development of those companies. I think Meg can go into any enterprise and visit with any CIO or CEO and do really well. So whether it is the technology side or the sales side, I don’t think anyone is giving her enough credit on those fronts. She can do just fine. And then on top of that she has strong operating executives under her who do know the enterprise business. But right now it is the need for leadership of the people, a focus on executing and operating. I could point back to Lou Gerstner at IBM, or even my own days at Oracle. When I joined Oracle, people thought the board had lost its mind, because I was a consultant at Booz Allen. People scoffed and said ‘How is a consultant going to lead the worldwide sales force at Oracle, a trained wolf pack?’ And somehow I figured it out. And I knew nothing about software, but I learned, and I learned from Larry Ellison, who is one of the best.

I want to talk a bit about Autonomy, and about unstructured data. You made a comment about that when you talked with Kara Swisher of AllThingsD yesterday. Talk to me about where you see Autonomy fitting within HP. Do you still intend to let it be independent? How do you see the alignment shaping up?

Whitman: It’s a big and fast-growing market. Of all the data out there, about 15 percent of it is structured and 85 percent of it is unstructured. And the unstructured data is growing by leaps and bounds. There are not a lot of good software companies that can help companies manage unstructured data and help companies make business decisions based on what they see in that unstructured data. So what we hope to do with Autonomy, and I’m enthusiastic about this acquisition, is take what is fabulous about Autonomy — they have a leading position in the marketplace — and put it through the very powerful HP distribution system. And I think what Mike Lynch is excited about — he is the founder and CEO of Autonomy — is taking this great product and getting it into more people’s hands. And we just need to grow this company as fast as we can; extend our lead and our accumulated experience in this area. So that’s the plan for Autonomy.

Lane: Yeah, I think the synergies are great, and I think it makes a lot of sense. It will make a lot of sense to customers if HP engages them in a dialogue of managing unstructured data.

You don’t think HP paid too much for Autonomy?

Whitman: You know what? It is what it is.

Lane: We wish we could have bought it for cheaper, but it was the market price. People thought we overpaid for 3Par, and you know what? We’re hitting it out of the park.

Is HP still going to be player in cloud services? That was a big commitment that Léo made in March. How far along is that plan?

Lane: Absolutely. The cloud is way ahead of plan. So our cloud services have gone live. So that is absolutely part of the plan, yes.

Meg, a lot of the same people who applauded your selection to HP’s board of directors are criticizing your selection as CEO. Why do you think there’s a disconnect?

Whitman: I don’t know. There’s always people who have different points of view on things. What I have to do — and I said this on the conference call — is lead this company, make it a great company again and fulfill its destiny as the icon of Silicon Valley and of California, and deliver the results. I will have to prove myself by delivering the results. If we’re going to restore the confidence that investors have in us, and that employees have in us, we have to deliver. We have to mean what we say and say what we mean and deliver the results. And that is what I intend to deliver.

Meg, you have a lot of history managing brands. I’m thinking of the job you had managing brands for Procter & Gamble. What’s wrong and what’s right about HP’s brand right now?

Whitman: I think HP is known as the world’s largest provider of information technology, and we are a trusted brand. We are a worldwide brand that touches both consumers and businesses. If you’re an enterprise, we have full suite of solutions. I know that when I bought enterprise hardware and software at eBay, I wanted one person to choke when something went wrong. I wanted one supplier to go to and say ‘Hey, this is not working.’ And so I think we have a fabulous brand in a world where technology is increasingly fundamental. I will say — and Ray would say this as well — I think we need crisper communications with all the constituencies. I think on Aug. 18 we confused people. We didn’t mean to do that, but we did. And so I think we’ve got some work to do around communicating crisply and cleanly about what we’re about — the moves that we’re making — to employees, customers, shareholders and, frankly, to the press.

Interest from the two software giants would seem a plausible explanation for the peculiar circumstances around Autonomy’s on-again, off-again talks about making an acquisition.

In April it said it would sell convertible bonds to raise money–nearly $800 million–to fund an acquisition, though it never named a target.

Then suddenly last month the company said the deal it had been working on was being put off because of another unspecified opportunity, which promptly sent its stock reeling. Autonomy shares, which trade on London’s FTSE, are down 27 percent from their 52-week high. It could be that whatever deal the company was working on was put on the back burner following unexpected overtures from Larry Ellison and Steve Ballmer.

Autonomy specializes in what it calls Meaning Based Computing. Its software is designed to recognize the relationships between structured data–what you find in an organized database–and unstructured data–which can be anything from words in a written document, a speech or conversation, or anything else that has information that isn’t organized into rows and columns. Its customers run the gamut from businesses such as FedEx, the NYSE, Louis Vuitton and Goodyear to tech firms like Adobe and Cisco Systems.

On its face this rumor is interesting because now that the battle to roll up the data storage firms is largely resolved following Dell’s acquisition of Compellent, one of the next dealmaking battle fronts for the large IT vendors is going to be software that makes managing data in all its various forms easier, more powerful and less costly.

Autonomy certainly fits that bill, and at market valuation in the $7 billion neighborhood, both Oracle and Microsoft could get it done.

However, the cynic in me wonders if this is just a deliberate rumor intended to goose Autonomy’s flagging stock price. If that’s the case, it appears to have worked.

The new Ask is faster than its predecessor. Its search results are more relevant and sharpened by structured data (TV listings, etc.) where available. And the little search engine that couldn’t is still using semantic technology to interpret and answer questions put to it by users. “To call it an all-new Ask is wrong; it’s an evolution of Ask,” said Barry Diller, CEO of Ask parent IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI). “I think it’s going to help us primarily in [visitor] retention and frequency. That is really its goal.”

But while it might appeal to some, Ask’s latest iteration isn’t likely to make much of a difference in the brutish battle for search engine market share. But then Ask doesn’t need much, does it? The search business is enormously profitable. As Microsoft’s (MSFT) Don Dodge once noted, every market-share point in search is worth a billion dollars or more. So if Ask manages to boost its share of all searches even slightly, it’s a success. “Search revenue for us is very profitable and it’s certainly growing,” said Diller. “Does it matter whether or not we take big chunks of…market share? No. Would we like and hope to? Yes.”

The new Ask is faster than its predecessor. Its search results are more relevant and sharpened by structured data (TV listings, etc.) where available. And the little search engine that couldn’t is still using semantic technology to interpret and answer questions put to it by users. “To call it an all-new Ask is wrong; it’s an evolution of Ask,” said Barry Diller, CEO of Ask parent IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI). “I think it’s going to help us primarily in [visitor] retention and frequency. That is really its goal.”

But while it might appeal to some, Ask’s latest iteration isn’t likely to make much of a difference in the brutish battle for search engine market share. But then Ask doesn’t need much, does it? The search business is enormously profitable. As Microsoft’s (MSFT) Don Dodge once noted, every market-share point in search is worth a billion dollars or more. So if Ask manages to boost its share of all searches even slightly, it’s a success. “Search revenue for us is very profitable and it’s certainly growing,” said Diller. “Does it matter whether or not we take big chunks of…market share? No. Would we like and hope to? Yes.”