Hewlett-Packard has agreed to acquire Peregrine and ApplQ.
HP has made a number of acquisitions to add to its OpenView offerings over the past two years, and it obviously appreciates the increasing importance of proactive, intelligent tools to enable organizations to meet the growing needs of business and manage the complexities of IT infrastructures effectively.
Peregrine has an extensive customer base that it stayed close to throughout its financial trials and tribulations of a few years ago. Its asset management and service management products enable IT departments to gain greater visibility and control of their IT environment, through the lifecycle management of IT assets and the optimization of global service delivery for the business. It addresses the requirements of IT management to align resources to demonstrate a significant value contribution and return on investment to the business. Managing the trade-off between enhanced service delivery and cost reduction in a climate of shrinking budgets and over-stretched resources has become a critical business issue.
HP says that the acquisition will help it deliver a more complete management software solution to CIOs and provide them with the ability to manage their IT assets. HP recently demonstrated its commitment to enabling the quality and cost-saving benefits derived from information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) and IT service management initiatives by achieving Pink Elephant’s Enhanced PinkVerify status for its HP OpenView Service Desk software. Peregrine has similarly been committed to ITIL.
However, the big test will come for HP in successfully managing the absorption of Peregrine and its products into the HP OpenView business. This comes at a time when there must be significant disruption within HP, due to the announcement of the cutting of around 10% of its workforce. Staff morale cannot be underestimated in its effect on company performance. HP found this with its cull of people following the Compaq acquisition. The capabilities of HP’s management will come under severe scrutiny over the next few months.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
