Less than a year after separating from its former consumer electronics arm, Hewlett Packard Enterprise could be bracing for another major shake-up. Anonymous insiders told Bloomberg this morning that the company is in the early stages of an effort to sell several key software divisions.

The biggest unit on the auction block is reportedly Autonomy, the UK-based analytics provider that HPE acquired for $10.3 billion in 2011. The company had to write off about 80 percent of the deal’s value shortly afterwards due to accounting improprieties, but the unit has nonetheless become an integral part of its software business. Autonomy’s flagship IDOL search platform is now integrated with several of the vendor’s other tools and powers a cloud-based Watson contender called Haven OnDemand. The latter offering also includes a columnar store called Vertica that is reportedly set to be sold off as well.

HPE obtained the database as part of a $350 million acquisition that closed a few months before the Autonomy deal. Mercury, the third and final division named in Bloomberg’s report, is likewise the product of a buyout. The management automation provider was purchased way back in 2006 for about $4.5 billion and has been going steady ever since. Assessing how much a sale might raise is difficult since HPE doesn’t disclose the revenues of individual units, but the performance of its software business as a whole suggests that realizing a full return on the acquisitions may prove difficult.

HPE made $780 million from the group last quarter, down 10 percent year-over-year. Selling off the most struggling parts of the business could provide the company with several billion dollars to invest in more promising units while streamlining operations on the long run. Management presumably hopes that the move will put the vendor in a better position to compete against rivals like Dell Inc., which has also been working to trim organizational redundancies. The hardware giant sold its professional services arm to Japan’s NTT Corp. for $3.5 million in March, spinned off network protection group SecureWorks the following month and most recently offloaded its software business to a pair of investment firms.

At recent HPE Discover John Furrier sat down with HPE COO who sheds some light on their financial strategy.

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