HP's Bid For Persist Is a Plug For Utility Computing

Brendan Malloy, director of defense sales at Telos, an Ashburn, Va.-based government solution provider that integrates products from both HP and Persist for the U.S. Army, said he was surprised by the acquisition, but felt that it is a great fit for HP and its channel.

"Persist has a good product. %85 [But it] was a little company," Malloy said. "It needed the support of a big company like HP."

Once HP, Palo Alto, Calif., integrates Persist into its product line, those products will be easier to offer to customers, Malloy said. "Now HP can leverage [Persist] across all its enterprise products," he said.

Nora Denzel, senior vice president of HP's Adaptive Enterprise and Software Global Business Unit, defined Adaptive Enterprise as a vision for how a company can change in realtime in response to business conditions. Adaptive Enterprise enables automated changes in a company's IT infrastructure.

Ultimately, Denzel said, there will be no more "IT projects" in the future. "Instead, you will have a business strategy, with IT changes to support [that strategy]," she said.

HP's information life-cycle management plans are tied closely to its Adaptive Enterprise strategy because of the automation needed for long-term data retention, said Rusty Smith, director of HP's information life-cycle management business. "This is a concern when data is created [that] will last longer than the application that created it and the storage device it is stored on," he said.

Among the new services unveiled by HP as part of Adaptive Enterprise are fully outsourced self-help and self-heal support for desktop, mobile and wireless users; IT Service Management certifications for service providers to help them maximize productivity, processes and technology for delivering services; and HP Mission Critical Partnership, in which the vendor or solution provider augments or replaces an end user's IT department.

The company also packaged many of its IT service management best practices into its new HP OpenView Service Desk, which HP executives said cover 80 percent of what a customer needs to change its IT processes without customization. HP is also offering assessment services for solution providers to help evaluate changes in their customers' IT infrastructures.

Other storage vendors have recently partnered in the information life-cycle management space as well. HP's acquisition of Persist, Pleasanton, Calif., comes on the heels of EMC's acquisition of Legato, which brought it e-mail archiving capabilities,

and Documentum, an enterprise content management developer. In the past few weeks, Hitachi Data Systems and StorageTek signed agreements with Ixos Software to integrate that vendor's e-mail archiving technology into their offerings.