Cap Gemini Boards ILM Train with HP

Following its bid to buy archiving specialist Persist Technologies last week, Hewlett Packard moved to extend its information lifecycle management strategy overseas by partnering with systems integrator Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (CGE&Y).

Palo Alto, Calif.’s HP will work with Paris-based CGE&Y to help customers manage critical data from its creation until its disposal, around the globe. HP hopes to piggyback on CGE&Y’s wide customer base while the systems integrator looks to benefit from as broad a range of storage management offerings as there exists on the market.

Financial terms were not disclosed. CGE&Y will pair its business consulting and services expertise with HP’s storage hardware and software business to provide completely managed solutions for customers.

The companies will focus on storage systems that address the migration, back-up, optimization and retrieval from database and application providers such as Oracle, SAP and Siebel. HP will also train an initial 100 storage architects at CGE&Y to help design, implement and deploy storage solutions for enterprise customers in Europe, North America and Asia.

CGE&Y has named HP as a preferred provider of systems, storage, consulting and support for joint HP storage engagements while CGE&Y is an external systems integrator for HP storage solutions and services. The technology HP is poised to acquire from Persist will serve as the keystone for the deal.

ILM has received a considerable bump in popularity in recent months on the strength of EMC’s move into the e-mail archiving and content management space with its purchase of Legato Systems and pending acquisition of Documentum, respectively.

Interest in ILM is rooted in the glut of compliance regulations that have sprung up over the last couple of years since several large companies were found guilty of accounting improprieties and shredding documents.

Regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA, and SEC 17A-4 have all lead to a slew of business audits because companies are now required to keep e-mail archived on tape, disk or other devices, or face litigation. Accordingly,
storage vendors like HP and EMC have been blending storage management with content management to concoct ILM.

While HP has taken pains to expand its ILM strategy of late, the pact, an extension of a long-standing alliance with CGEY, is also emblematic of HP’s “Adaptive Enterprise” strategy to narrow the gulf between business and IT operations.