HP Is Serious About Software: 25 Reasons Why

by Darryl K. Taft

HP in September appointed Leo Apotheker, former CEO of enterprise software maker SAP, as CEO. Apotheker had served on the SAP executive board since 2002 and was named co-CEO of SAP in 2008. His software background makes him an ideal candidate to lead the company as it takes a more serious look at the software business.

HP’s executive vice president of software and solutions, Bill Veghte, spent nearly 20 years at Microsoft, where he served as senior vice president for the company’s $15 billion global Windows business. HP hired Veghte in May, signaling a move to make a bigger splash in the software industry.

Marge Breya, a seasoned software executive with roots in Sun Microsystems’ Java camp, serves as general manager for Software & Solutions at HP, with responsibility for all aspects of the unit’s marketing worldwide, including execution of go-to-market strategy and coordination of an integrated, global marketing program that help enable the field. She also is a member of the HP Software & Solutions leadership team tasked with driving overall business strategy.

HP had already begun making noise in software, but one of its key early acquisitions was Bluestone Software in 2000. Bluestone made a Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition application server and provided Internet software platforms, tools and technologies for business-to-business, business-to-consumer and mobile Internet transactions. The deal expanded HP’s Internet software portfolio.

HP acquired Peregrine in December 2005. Peregrine made IT asset and service management software and was bought for $425 million, enabling HP Software to deliver a more complete management software.

HP acquired Mercury for $4.5 billion in November 2006. Mercury Interactive was an application quality management, business service management, and project and portfolio management software vendor, and the company’s software provides the core for the new ALM 11 technology HP announced Nov. 30.

HP bought Bristol in February 2007. This acquisition added monitoring of complex business transactions across heterogeneous and distributed IT environments.

HP in June 2007 acquired SPI Dynamics, which made application security software that allows customers to assess and identify security vulnerabilities of Web applications throughout their life cycle as part of their application quality management. SPI Dynamics software makes up part of the new HP Hybrid 2.0 security technology.

HP bought Opsware in September 2007 for $1.6 billion. The acquisition of the data center automation software company enhanced HP’s BTO (business technology optimization) software portfolio to deliver a comprehensive and fully integrated solution for service automation.

HP in April 2008 acquired Tower Software, a document and records management software company, to broaden e-discovery and compliance management solutions for government and highly regulated commercial organizations. Combined, HP and Tower offer integrated electronic records management, information archiving and record retention—all in a single portfolio.

With the acquisition of Fortify, HP will offer a complete solution that helps organizations reduce business risk, meet compliance regulations and protect against malicious application attacks by integrating security assurance seamlessly across the application life cycle. HP and Fortify’s history of collaboration includes the introduction in February of Hybrid 2.0, a security analysis technology that strengthened an earlier integration announced in June 2009. HP completed its acquisition of Fortify in September.

HP bought Stratavia, a privately held database and application automation company, in September. The acquisition will strengthen the HP Software and Solutions portfolio, adding deployment, configuration and management solutions for enterprise databases, middleware and packaged applications. Stratavia’s database and application automation solutions, combined with HP’s BSA (business service automation) portfolio, give organizations a one-stop shop for infrastructure and application deployment management. Stratavia offerings also enhance the HP Cloud Service Automation solution by simplifying and automating the deployment of databases, middleware and packaged applications in cloud computing environments.

HP closed its purchase of ArcSight in October. The combination of HP and ArcSight will improve security, reduce risk and facilitate compliance at a lower cost for customers. ArcSight’s technology is complementary to HP’s existing security portfolio of hardware, software and services. Integrating ArcSight’s technology with HP’s IT operations management portfolio will enable organizations to converge millions of events across IT operations and security, providing deeper context than either platform alone.

HP’s new ALM 11 technology simplifies application development with a single unified system for developer, QA and security teams. It will reduce delivery time and costs by 50 percent, and accelerate application delivery. It also will mitigate risks by proactively securing applications, reducing application defects more than 80 percent compared with the industry average.

HP’s BTO solutions ensure that every dollar invested in technology, every resource allocated, and every application or service in development or production delivers against defined business objectives. HP Software’s BTO portfolio combines ArcSight, Fortify, Stratavia, OpenView, Peregrine, Mercury and Opsware strengths to enhance IT management; bolster application security; link IT performance, costs and planning; and automate critical IT functions across strategy, applications and operations.

These solutions help clients manage both structured and unstructured information to make more informed business decisions and improve operational efficiencies. The portfolio includes governance and e-discovery, business continuity and availability, and document workflow transformation tools.

These solutions help clients realize the full value of BI investments by leveraging industry and business expertise. The portfolio includes enterprise-class business intelligence solutions consisting of services, software, hardware and partner technologies.

These solutions help CIOs improve the predictability of business outcomes at every stage of a project life cycle. HP offers a comprehensive and flexible range of services to help clients be successful throughout the life cycle, including professional, support and SAAS (software as a service).

HP TRIM 7 is a records management solution built on 24 years of experience and best practices, enabling organizations to transparently manage all of their Microsoft SharePoint Server records in a single environment. This includes documents and information in SharePoint Server blogs, wikis, discussions, forms, calendars and workflows.

Based on HP Quality Center software and HP ALM services, HP Agile Accelerator manages Agile development projects from proposal to production while helping IT departments better meet application modernization initiatives. HP Agile Accelerator helps software development teams improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of their business initiatives with predefined workflows, configurations and user reports.

HP Service Test Management 10.5 and the enhanced HP Functional Testing 10.0 enable clients to focus their time on application quality while improving the line of sight between development and quality assurance teams. HP Service Test Management 10.5 helps clients mitigate risk and improve business agility.

The software ensures application quality to address changing business demands. With the new Web 2.0 Feature Pack and Extensibility Accelerator, HP Functional Testing now provides comprehensive support for dynamic Web 2.0 applications and enables testing of any rich Internet applications technology with a single product. The new solutions are part of the HP ALM portfolio.

The HP ten.to.one initiative includes HP LoadRunner in the Cloud application performance testing offering designed to help IT organizations optimize their Website performance for changing business demands. It’s available via Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. HP Data Protector with Hyper-V gives customers eight methods of protection when running environments using Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. HP SiteScope Operations Manager offers midsize organizations a way to more easily and more quickly monitor IT infrastructures and applications.

HP BSM 9.0 improves IT operations by enabling staff to manage application performance and availability to meet service-level agreements. HP BSM 9.0 provides a run-time service model, new collaboration capabilities using Web 2.0 mashups and automation of the entire event resolution process to reduce troubleshooting costs. The announcements came out of the HP Universe D.C. show in June.