HP ID Management Buy to Fill Gaps

NEW YORK — HP’s move to acquire TruLogica Thursday was the latest bid in a spate of buys to bolster the system vendor’s computing strategy against rival IBM.

David Gee, vice president of Adaptive Enterprise for Palo Alto, Calif.’s HP, said Dallas-based TruLogica, will help the company plug another hole — identity management software — in its Adaptive Enterprise strategy to provide an environment that will allow customers to adapt to their business needs on the fly.

HP’s “Adaptive Enterprise” computing paradigm is often referred to as on-demand or utility computing. Automation, management, security and several other characteristics hold the virtualization and provisioning platform together to produce a network that practically manages itself. With an on-demand system, HP said its users will also be able to self-administer upgrades or downgrades in resources and pay as they go.

Having a solid foundation such as this has become a quest for major systems vendors such as HP and IBM, whose on-demand computing strategy is also strong, as well as several smaller entrants such as Sun Microsystems , VERITAS Software and Computer
Associates .

At a briefing in New York, Gee said Adaptive Enterprise stacks up well against chief rival IBM’s on-demand strategy because assets from these acquisitions fall under one simple platform while IBM’s components are spread across the Armonk, N.Y. company’s five chief software brands, DB2, Tivoli, WebSphere, Rational and Lotus.

Gee said TruLogica will join the OpenView Select Access portfolio to provide management capabilities to more tightly bind user provisioning to companies’ business processes.

The assets also include self-service features automated password reset and synchronization; service-oriented architecture (SOA) capabilities; and support for industry standards.

“Identity management is one of the key things you have to do if you want to manage your IT as a business,” Gee told internetnews.com during an interview in New York City. “It asks: ‘Who are you and what are you going to have me go and do?'” Gee said. “The next step after identity management is provisioning resources based on who you are.”

Gee said TruLogica software establishes hierarchies of access, where CIOs will have greater degrees of access than entry-level employees. Those terminated will be wiped off systems immediately to prevent data theft or corruption. In this way, TruLogica software squarely competes with IBM’s Tivoli Identity Manager and Tivoli Access Manager.

HP’s Adaptive Enterprise strategy was more or less a gleam in the vendor’s eye a year ago, as the OpenView management software platform was missing several key components, Gee said. But over the last year, HP has been busier on the acquisition front than it has been in years.

HP’s spree of software buys extends from July 2003 to the present and includes: the SelectAccess security assets from Baltimore Technologies, Talking Blocks for Web services management, Persist Technologies for information lifecycle management, Novadigm and Consera for IT automation and TruLogica.