Palo Alto, California-based HP will pay an undisclosed sum to acquire Upminster, UK-based FHG, which provides hardware support, audit and integration services, helpdesk, training, and project management services, partnering with HP, Compaq, IBM and Fujitsu tools. The company has worked in partnership with HP for the past eight years.

The deal adds to last week’s 340m euros ($427m) acquisition of Triaton GmbH from German industrial giant ThyssenKrupp. HP came out on top of a bidding process against Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, CSC, Deutsche Telecom’s T-Systems unit, IBM, and Tata Consultancy Services. The acquisition is thought to be HP’s largest ever pure services buy. Triaton is one of Germany’s largest independent IT service providers, with 2003 revenue of 370m euros ($465m) and 2,200 staff.

Barry Joyce, worldwide director of software licensing management solutions at HP, told ComputerWire that HP has been working together with FHG for the past three years integrating FHG’s two software products called License Management Service and Inventory Management Service. The recently merged products help corporations with multiple locations manage and audit software and hardware licenses across large business.

Joyce said: FHG is relatively small employing only 13 or 14 people specialising in software and inventory management. We will take on some of the intellectual property of LMS and IMS. FGH has built up these products over time, and we needed to bring in house to increase its services capability.

FHG does not reveal the names of its customers, but it claims to have provided a major project for an international entertainment company, that involved it providing hardware and software audits in just six weeks for 12,000 PCs, and 200 servers, across 43 countries. It also boasts having audited 500 PCs, and hardware upgrades across seven sites for a UK government organization. Joyce claims that HP and FHG are together deploying the system for a client with some 65,000 desktop seats.

Joyce said HP plans to roll the FHG operation into HP Services’ software licensing management solutions division. He said this division makes some $900m from software licensing on a global basis, ranking as the largest Microsoft software reseller in EMEA, and the third largest in the world.

This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire