HP Acquisition Advances IT Automation

Hewlett-Packard today moved to enhance its portfolio of IT-automation tools with the acquisition of Stratavia, a provider of tools for automating the deployment of databases, middleware and enterprise application software.

According to Erik Frieberg, vice president of marketing for business technology operations within HP’s Software & Solutions Group , the acquisition of Stratavia takes HP’s IT automation strategy beyond the infrastructure layer to include the entire application stacks. Frieberg said this is necessary because when it comes to deployment, these are the areas where IT personnel tend to make the most errors. That can result in all kinds of unintended consequences downstream.

In addition, Frieberg noted that as cloud computing continues to evolve, IT organizations will not be able to manage the scale of computing required without embracing more sophisticated automation tools. To that end, Frieberg said HP sees Stratavia as a natural extension of its recently announced Cloud Service Automation suite of management tools.

Andy Wright, vice president of product marketing for Stratavia, said its support for diverse sets of software and the amount subject-matter expertise the company has acquired in thousands of deployment scenarios set the Stratavia apart.

With the advent of virtualization and cloud computing, enterprise computing is being reinvented on a daily basis. The challenge IT organizations, then, is to realize that their manual processes will no longer keep pace. The dynamic nature of next-generation enterprise computing will require them to  embrace IT process automation.