News

HP extends 'Adaptive Enterprise' with TruLogica buy

• By John K. Waters
• March 15, 2004

Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co. last week signed a definitive agreement to buy TruLogica, a Dallas-based provider of identity management software. HP plans to integrate the privately owned company's ID management technology into its OpenView Select Access software to form "a complete federated identity management offering." Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Nora Denzel, HP's senior vice president for Adaptive Enterprise, said HP's plans to incorporate the TruLogica automated user provisioning technology into the HP OpenView management software portfolio can help users to cut costs and time managing changes in user IT privileges.

Observers said the TruLogica deal is the latest in a string of acquisitions HP has made over the last year to support its move toward a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which the company calls the Adaptive Enterprise. Competitors IBM and Silicon Valley neighbor Sun Microsystems are pursuing similar strategies; IBM calls its technology "On Demand" computing, while Sun's is called "N1."

HP has said that it would spend as much as a $1 billion to acquire companies and technologies needed to complete its Adaptive Enterprise portfolio. Last summer, HP announced that it would acquire other ID management technologies through the purchase of "substantially all of the software assets" of the SelectAccess unit of U.K.-based Baltimore Technologies. In September, HP bought San Francisco-based Talking Blocks for its Web services management solution. A month later, the company announced that it would acquire Persist Technologies for its information life-cycle management software. And in February of this year, HP disclosed plans to buy Consera Software and Novadigm Inc. to add automation capabilities to the mix. (The Consera acquisition was completed later that month; the Novadigm acquisition is pending, subject to Novadigm shareholder approval and standard closing conditions.)

Phil Schacter, vice president and director at enterprise network technologies and architecture watchers The Burton Group, sees ID management as a critical piece of the SOA picture.

"Increasingly, enterprise customers are looking for integrated identity management solutions from their major management and platform technology partners," Schacter said. "Identity and entitlement provisioning and management over the life cycle of a business relationship [are] critical to effective management of service delivery, achieving regulatory compliance and enabling new business opportunities without compromising security."

TruLogica's software automates the time-consuming process of managing user privileges across multiple technology systems, instantly allowing end users access to the right IT resources according to pre-determined policies and processes. HP believes that the integration of the TruLogica solution with its OpenView Select Access product will automate the full range of IT user life-cycle management and access control tasks, from user activation to deactivation.