HP Acquires OuterBay for Database Archiving Products

Published: February 9, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hewlett-Packard this week acquired a relatively unknown specialist in information lifecycle management, or ILM, named Outerbay, which as the name suggests is based down the road from HP HQ in Silicon Gulch.

OuterBay was founded in 1997 by Richard Butterfield, a techie with expertise in tuning systems to run ERP applications who also worked as a manager and technical specialist at Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Information Builders, and Logitech. The company bills itself as a pioneer in the ILM space, particularly with structured data stored in databases through a product called LiveArchive. This product was initially used to provide archiving of information stored in databases behind Oracle E-Business Suite.

The OuterBay deal follows HP's acquisitions of Peregrine Systems for around $425 million and AppIQ for around $200 million back in September 2005. HP has integrated Peregrine's asset and services management products into OpenView product line; Peregrine has 700 employees and 2,500 customers. HP bought AppIQ because it was an up-and-coming storage management software vendor; it had 125 employees and 250 customers at the time of the acquisition last year. With OuterBay, HP gains 60 employees with deep knowledge of ILM, and area where rivals EMC, IBM, and Sun have made acquisitions in these areas recent years. OuterBay will be merged into HP's StorageWorks storage line, not in its software unit, and its database archiving tools will be used to archive databases behind major ERP suites. HP said, interestingly, that 60 percent of its Integrity server customers deploy Oracle databases and applications. The OuterBay tools can interface with SQL Server and Sybase databases as well and SAP and the former PeopleSoft suites. HP did not say how much it paid for OuterBay.