HP snaps up mgmt. software companies

HP last week announced plans to acquire Consera Software and Novadigm, moves industry watchers say will add needed management technologies to the company's OpenView suite and will help HP fill holes in its utility computing strategy.

The company says Consera and Novadigm products initially will be branded as OpenView and sold as part of the management software suite. HP will provide further product integration in the coming months.

Novadigm's technology will let OpenView push out new configurations, applications and patches to servers, desktops, mobile clients and network devices. The capabilities would enable the dynamic provisioning and reallocation of computing resources that many utility computing visions boast. Despite the range of capabilities HP's OpenView management software suite covers, "the [Novadigm] technology was notably absent from HP's offerings," says Glenn O'Donnell, program director at Meta Group.

Until now, HP partnered with Novadigm and Altiris to offer these features to its customers, which O'Donnell says will make it easier for HP to integrate Novadigm into its product suite. HP says it has no plans to change its partnership with Altiris.

HP expects the Novadigm deal to close by the end of the second quarter, pending approval from Novadigm shareholders. While the exact cost of the acquisition was not disclosed, the share price for the public company could put the Novadigm acquisition at about $121 million.

Meanwhile, the Consera deal will augment HP's provisioning offerings with business process modeling and tracking capabilities.

"Consera is doing a combination of provisioning and workflow engineering," says Jamie Gruener, a senior analyst with The Yankee Group. He says Consera technology will add automation and virtualization features to HP's utility computing vision. "The basic foundation of data center operation is being able to virtualize a resource. Consera lets you migrate, discover and deploy server automation."

HP expects the deal with Consera, a privately held company, to close within 30 days. The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The two acquisitions bring the number of technologies that HP has acquired in the past six months to five. In September 2003, HP acquired Talking Blocks for Web services management and Baltimore Technologies' Select Access technology for identity management. In November 2003, HP acquired Persist Technologies for information life-cycle management capabilities.

The purchases bolster HP's utility computing architecture, Adaptive Enterprise, which incorporates HP's hardware, software and services, and integrates them to help customers quickly respond to changing resource needs and thus help their organizations run more efficiently. HP competes with Computer Associates, IBM, Microsoft and Sun, which all have laid out plans for so-called utility computing technologies.

Senior Editor Deni Connor contributed to this story.