HP Buys Bristol Technology

Providing its answer to CA Inc’s Wily, Hewlett-Packard Co has announced its intention to buy Bristol Technology Inc, a provider of tools that dissect transaction performance.

It would formalize an OEM relationship that Mercury Interactive, now owned by HP, established with the company early last year, when it tied Bristol’s TransactionVision tools into Mercury’s Business Availability Center.

Since then, Mercury has sold over 20 joint installs, which outnumbered Bristol’s base with other partners, IBM and BMC.

According to Ramin Satar, a director of products for HP who came from Mercury and was involved in the original Bristol partnership, the Mercury integration with Bristol was much deeper than that with IBM or BMC.

“The tools were already integrated and didn’t require the degree of services involved with the other vendors,” he claimed.

Like CA’s Wily, Bristol’s TransactionVision instruments transactions as they pass through various processing tiers in a multi-tiered environment.

Unlike Wily, Bristol doesn’t have the end user correlation. Instead, it goes beyond Wily’s support of J2EE and .NET with the ability to introspect legacy CICS transactions, and it can pierce the envelope to inspect what’s in the body of the transaction.

Although Bristol is a small company, HP is not disclosing staff count. However, staffing is modest and, like most niche firms, is largely concentrated in product development and support. Consequently, once the acquisition clears, HP expects to retain most of the staff.

Going forward, it’s likely that HP would pick up the pace in integrating the TransactionVision technology into the CMDB (Configuration Management Database) that came through the mercury acquisition. It’s not likely that HP will plow much resource into Bristol’s scattered legacy testing tools. And while HP stated the usual, “We will support existing clients,” it will likely pull the plug from Bristol’s IBM and BMC partnerships.

HP expects the acquisition to close within the month, with the undisclosed amount paid being modest enough as to not have any material impact on revenues.