Now that Hewlett-Packard has closed its $4.5bn acquisition of Mercury Interactive, as well as dropping the Mercury brand going forward I’ve learned that it will also ditch its well-known OpenView systems and network management brand.
“You are going to see the gradual phase-out of both the Mercury and OpenView brands,” Tom Hogan, senior vice president of HP Software told me. “You’ll see that OpenView will be phased out gradually over time.”
HP first announced the OpenView family way back in 1988, with the first products being network management tools designed to compete with IBM’s NetView SNA-based network manager. Since then it has steadily grown to take in asset management, business service management, configuration management, IT service management and operations management.
While it is not so surprising that HP will phase out the Mercury brand — particularly since Mercury was embroiled in a stock options accounting scandal a while back — it is more surprising and seems a more recent decision that HP is phasing out the venerable OpenView brand too.
In place of OpenView and Mercury the company will call the combination of the two businesses simply HP Software, though it will target an area Mercury’s marketing department coined, namely Business Technology Optimization (BTO).
As ComputerWire reported the day before yesterday, HP will retain some of Mercury’s product names, for example its LoadRunner testing tool brand, while the Systinet repository that Mercury only recently acquired will be known as the HP Systinet Registry.
HP’s Hogan said the company will not reveal any detailed product integration plans before January, as HP does not want to disrupt the former Mercury business before year-end.
But he made it clear that although the company is phasing out the OpenView brand, it is not dumping the core systems and network management technologies that OpenView is famous for, simply to concentrate on Mercury’s testing, performance management and IT governance products.
“We think BTO needs systems [management], network [management], applications and business logic and finally the data and information itself,” said Hogan. “All of those need to be contemplated, managed and optimized to drive real value to the business, and we think our key differentiator is that we now have all four of those.”
