As part of a recently-announced plan to aggressively sell IT services on top of its OpenView network and systems management infrastructure (CI No 3,127), Hewlett-Packard Co’s been shopping in Euorpe for a few items, yesterday swallowing $20m Dutch IT service management company Prolin NV for an undisclosed amount. Prolin has 300 customers for its IT Service Manager suite of eight modules which deliver and manage company-wide email, application-to-application and other services – such as SAP AG R/3 information – across organizations. The two claim there’s no conflict between Prolin’s configuration, helpdesk, change, problem, distribution, report and service level managers and some OpenView services which bear the same name. They operate at different levels. OpenView provides the infrastructure and management of it, while Prolin utilizes OpenView to manage delivery of application services. Prolin, which will be up to 180 employees by year-end, is to be operated as an OpenView business unit. Its platform-independent software already supports HP’s IT Service Management Reference Model and will be extended with other APIs to provide even tighter integration with OpenView.
