Wednesday, 2 April 2008

HP to Acquire Tower Software, Expand e-Discovery & Compliance Capabilities

Hewlett Packard (HP) entered into a pre-bid agreement Tuesday to acquire Tower, a document and records management software company based in Canberra, Australia in a bid to expand its offerings in the fast-growing electronic discovery and compliance software market.

According to HP, the acquisition of Tower will add electronic records management to its Software’s existing e-discovery and compliance capabilities in information collection and retention. This includes both records management and identification, which have become increasingly important for organizations due to rules and regulations such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts.

Under an existing alliance between the companies, Tower TRIM Context has been integrated with the HP Integrated Archive Platform to provide customers with a combined records management and compliance archiving solution.

Combining HP’s and Tower’s overall software capabilities will enable customers to rapidly identify electronic business records from general business communication, collect those business records in a scalable and high-performance archive platform and preserve them for long-term future use in legal discovery or compliance activities.

“In reaction to increased business regulation, electronic records management has moved from a back-office task to a business-critical function,” said Robin Purohit, vice president and general manager, Information Management, Software, HP.

“The combination of the HP and Tower software portfolios is expected to be hugely beneficial to the legal and IT organizations of businesses all over the world.”

The addition of Tower also is expected to enable HP Software to address the growing Microsoft SharePoint compliance and e-discovery opportunities. Content stored in Microsoft SharePoint is coming under increased scrutiny from litigators, legal counsels and compliance officers involved in legal discovery, corporate governance or regulatory compliance.

“The combination of HP and Tower will allow us to scale and provide our customers with a comprehensive portfolio of enterprise information and IT management software solutions,” said Martin Harwood, chief executive officer, Tower Software.

“We have partnered with HP for years, so today’s news is exciting because we will now be able to enhance how we serve our joint customers and partners.”

Tower has more than 22 years of paper and electronic records management experience and serves approximately 1,000 customers with more than 780,000 users in 32 countries.