HP to axe tools as Mercury comes on board

HP uses its annual Software Universe conference to unveil a major shake-up of its software portfolio

HP today used its annual Software Universe conference in Vienna to unveil a major shake-up of its software portfolio that will see the company drop its OpenView software brand and axe several tools as it begins to integrate technology from recently acquired IT governance specialist Mercury.

At a conference attended by 3,800 customers, HP admitted that while the HP and Mercury product sets are highly complementary, a small overlap exists and as a result the vendor will "sunset" some application management and performance and availability tools. Ian Curtis, head of HP Software in the UK, said that the tools in question – HP has not yet revealed which tools - were relatively marginal and that the company "was not going to be wiping out significant streams of revenue for either organisation on the back of integration". He also insisted that customers had been consulted about the decisions, that their investments would be protected and that there would be clear "migration paths for the tools that will be sunsetted".

The tools will be axed as part of a major reorganisation of the expanded HP portfolio that will see the company drop its OpenView brand in favour of HP Software and reorganise its products into nine bundles or software centres covering a range of IT governance areas such as project and portfolio management, availability, IT quality, and change and configuration management. These centres will in turn be integrated to support three common IT initiative lifecycles: change and configuration management, IT service development and management, and performance and availability management. Russ Daniels, software chief technology officer at HP, said that this lifecycle approach would allow IT chiefs to use integrated software solutions to manage their entire IT initiative lifecycles.

This new integrated portfolio will help lower the cost and risk of deploying management tools, according to HP's senior vice-president of software, Tom Hogan. "[HP and Mercury] have a lot of joint customers who have already done the integration work themselves," he explained. "Now we'll manage that integration and provide it out-of-the-box... customers would sooner have the work done for them as they don't have to do maintenance and upgrades on homegrown integration. "

Jean Phillippe Draye, senior architect manager at networking giant Avaya, which already runs both HP and Mercury software, welcomed the news, claiming integration would reduce the company's support costs. "In the coming months, we expect to see HP do what we have already done internally and link application management [from Mercury] with IT service management tools [from HP]," he said.

However, HP offered no clear timeline for when new fully integrated HP and Mercury products will emerge, insisting that its post-merger product integration path would follow an evolutionary process. "Instead of setting arbitrary integration points, the aim will be to continually elevate the levels of integration," said Hogan.

Curtis dimissed suggestions that the lack of clear release dates may prompt some customers to delay investments in anticipation of fully combined HP and Mercury toolsets. "We're not advocating people wait until integration out-the-box [is available]," he said. "The issues we are dealing with in supporting the IT initiative right from planning to operation are current issues that firms can't wait to address."

Separately, the vendor also unveiled a range of new products, including new versions of its ServiceCenter and Configuration Management suite and a new Change Control Management suite designed to model the outcomes of IT changes before they are made and automatically notify administrators of the business risk.

HP said the new releases coupled with the new portfolio's ability to support every aspect in the IT lifecycle highlighted the company's commitment to software and proved it was shrugging off its reputation as a purely hardware vendor. Hogan said the acquisition of Mercury had made HP the sixth-largest software company in the world, according to IDC, and that it would continue to invest heavily in expanding its software business.