HP Bids $1.6B For Datacenter Lead With Opsware

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UPDATED: Looking to corral the market for automating tedious but
vital datacenter
tasks, HP (Quote) today agreed to buy Opsware
(Quote) for $1.6 billion in cash, a 38 percent premium over
Opsware’s Friday closing price of $10.28 a share.

In a separate deal, HP also bid to acquire thin-client computing software
maker Neoware (Quote) for $214 million, a 6 percent premium
of its Friday closing price of $15.24.

Opsware’s software is expected to help HP provision servers, networks and
storage devices, and manage any changes in those resources to help companies
reduce upgrades normally completed with manual labor. Reducing human labor
in turn helps cut costs and improve service levels by minimizing the
downtime associated with human error.

Such jobs, including providing patches and upgrading software to newer
versions, is a dull but necessary part of IT that helps businesses hew to
the auditing tasks associated with corporate compliance regulations,
including Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA.

Thomas E. Hogan, senior vice president of HP Software, said Opsware’s
datacenter automation portfolio will enable HP to address customers’
“explosion in complexity” associated with the doubling of new network,
server and storage devices every five years.

“Combining these automation assets with the rest of the strength of HP’s
software portfolio provides customers with what we would describe as the
trifecta of capability,” Hogan said on a conference call.

In the broader view, Hogan said HP will use Opsware’s assets with its
existing IT
management software, cobbled from previous buys of Mercury Interactive, Peregrine Systems and SPI Dynamics, in order to boost its business technology optimization (BTO)
portfolio.

Should the deal close by the end of HP’s fourth quarter, Opsware will
become part of the HP Software business. Opsware CEO Ben Horowitz will lead HP’s
BTO organization, reporting to Hogan.

While HP appears be the winner in the Opsware sweepstakes, rivals IBM (Quote) and BMC (Quote) should also be seen as bidders in the Opsware market. After all, automating the IT operations in a datacenter is right in all
three companies’ bailiwicks.

On sheer financial resources, IBM would be the most likely candidate to
block HP’s bid, especially now that HP will have the resources to try to
overtake IBM’s leadership position in the server provisioning space.

In a question and answer session with media and analysts after the call,
Hogan declined to comment about whether he expects IBM to counter HP’s bid.

He did say that while HP competed in the server automation market versus IBM
and Opsware, the “ratio of deals where Opsware was the lead competitor and
ultimately the winner from our perspective dominated the presence of IBM.”

“We believe that Opsware has the market leading solution and how IBM might
react or respond to this is unclear to me and something you’d have to ask
them,” said Hogan, responding to a question from an internetnews.com

reporter.

IBM declined to respond to questions regarding a counter bid.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.