With all the focus on the bidding war with Dell for the recent 3Par acquisition, HP’s other software company purchases had fallen a bit of the radar. But today’s announcement of the planned acquisition of ArcSight brings some earlier purchases back into the light.
It certainly seems that HP has decided that the best way to expand their datacenter and cloud computing business offerings is via acquisition, rather than in-house development at this point. And the two previously acquired companies, Fortify Software and Stratavia, both privately held, along with ArcSight certainly strengthens HP position as a cloud solutions provider.
The first acquisition, Fortify Software, is a business that has developed applications use a line-by-libne security analysis that search for flaws in code that offer may provide security problems or run afoul of regulatory compliance issues. The second, Stratavia offers software that provides automation ion the deployment of applications across hybrid environments; those utilizing public and private clouds, with a focus on database, middleware, and packaged applications. And today’s announcement, ArcSight, gives them widely regarded security and compliance monitoring tools. All of which are critical components of full blown cloud service offerings.
Automating enterprise cloud deployments while maintaining security and meeting regulatory compliance needs is an incredibly useful ability to be added to HPs portfolio. The big question is one of how long it will take HP to digest all these recent acquisitions and deliver these technologies in some form of unified service offering, rather than as discrete components that come together only as a result of a common ownership.
