HP looks longingly at Enterprise Software

Interesting short comment out this morning from CIBC Equity Research in New York. Seems that Hewlett-Packard is looking at the BI space:

“HP Launches Business Intelligence Initiative

HP has announced that is has formed a new division within the software organization, called the Business Information Optimization group. The new division will be broken into two groups, the business intelligence group and the information management group. The information management group is focused on data retrieval, archival and protection. The business intelligence group will control HP’s newest BI initiative, HP Neoview, an enterprise data warehouse. HP also announced that it has hired Ben C. Barnes, formerly of ActivIdentity (CEO), IBM Global Business Intelligence Solutions (general manager), and Teradata (general manager, marketing). We view this news as indicative of HP’s desire to proactively grow its enterprise software capabilities.”

From what we see, particularly through the eyes of our profitable portfolio company Longview Solutions, there is still plenty of decent growth for CPM (Corporate Performance Management) across the board and maybe general BI in the larger enterprises. HP may well have a combination build-and-buy strategy in mind. While there are probably are dozens of application providers, I can think of few mid to large free standing firms to use as a platform beyond Longview, Outlooksoft and possibly KCI.

MRM