HP has agreed to acquire Vertica, an analytics platform provider, the companies said February 14. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of HP’s 2011 fiscal year, which will end April 30.
An HP spokesperson told Direct Marketing News that “it’s too soon to tell if Vertica will retain its brand” and added that “employee decisions will be made at the conclusion of the acquisition process.”
The deal will enable HP clients to analyze real-time business information in physical, virtual and cloud environments, HP said.
“[Vertica has] proven success, including a strong presence in telecommunications, financial services, healthcare and Internet gaming,” the spokesperson said.
Analytics acquisitions have become more common in the software industry in the past 24 months. Last month, Adobe Systems acquired data management platform provider Demdex, a year after buying analytics company Omniture for $1.8 billion. In the past two years IBM spent more than $3 billion on analytics transactions, including the acquisitions of Coremetrics, Netezza, Unica and SPSS.
Vertica brings more than 300 clients to HP, including Groupon, Twitter, Verizon and AOL. Vertica won Groupon’s account in January.
“We have been long overdue for an HP acquisition related to business intelligence (BI),” said Boris Evelson, analyst at Forrester Research. “We’ve been saying for years that HP had to do something because they’ve had business consulting capabilities without a BI product offering. Not only is Vertica a good move, but I hope it’s the first in a string of HP BI acquisitions.”
Evelson predicted HP will acquire companies that can populate, cleanse, synchronize and report on the data in the Vertica database offering.
Last month, HP CMO Michael Mendenhall left the company. In September, HP hired former SAP chief executive Léo Apotheker as its president and CEO.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
