HP to acquire Mercury Interactive for IT management

It’s the clearest sign yet of how seriously HP takes the market for IT management services. The company will add Mercury Interactive’s application management, implementation and IT governance offerings and infrastructure to its own HP OpenView systems, network and IT service management software. Combined with its recently-acquired Peregrine service centre and asset-management software, we’re looking at one of the industry’s biggest and most comprehensive overall suites for optimising, automating and streamlining business IT services. Says HP CEO Mark Hurd: “Together, [these offerings] will help customers cut their IT costs, speed the delivery of new services and drive profitable growth at HP. We expect this important acquisition to deliver significant value for our shareholders.” And Thomas Hogan, HP senior vice president for software, adds: “HP’s software strategy is to be the clear leader in end-to-end enterprise IT management, and to help our customers tightly align IT priorities with changing business requirements. Combining our HP OpenView offerings with Mercury’s BTO Enterprise offerings will integrate the many building blocks of enterprise IT management into one complete solution for the entire IT lifecycle – from planning through to deployment and operations.” Mary Johnston Turner, for analyst Ovum, says: “We believe HP is spot on in recognising that CIOs need more unified toolkits to help them provision, operate and optimise end-to-end IT and business services. But, we believe the jury is still out on whether CIOs will turn to HP – a traditional systems management company – rather than a recognised software player such as IBM, Microsoft or Oracle, which are all also investing to build out similarly-integrated application and infrastructure management portfolios. “To be taken seriously as a combined network, systems and application lifecycle management player, HP will have to do more than just change the Mercury logo and website. Rather, HP must orchestrate an effective integration of sales teams, channels, development teams and management staff while demonstrating to its CIO customers that the benefits of integrating management across development and operations on a shared set of tools and platforms is worth the effort. “And of course, this is all assuming that Mercury is able to wrap up its ongoing SEC investigation in a satisfactory manner.”