HP to buy TruLogica for automated provisioning

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) has agreed to acquire TruLogica Inc. in order to integrate the company's automated IT provisioning software in its HP OpenView network management tool, HP announced Thursday.

By integrating TruLogica's software into OpenView Select Access, HP will be able to offer a complete federated identity management system, it said. HP acquired the Select Access federated identity technology from Baltimore Technologies PLC last year.

Adding TruLogica's technology will reduce the time it takes to enroll a new user in systems across an entire enterprise from a week to a few hours, HP said. TruLogica's software allows businesses to align user provisioning with the company's business processes, making functions including registering new users, delegating administrative rights, enforcing security policies and auditing simpler and easier to maintain, HP said.

Among the other features that attracted HP to the software were its self-service options, allowing users to manage some aspects of their own security profile such as resetting and synchronizing forgotten passwords, the company said. TruLogica's support for industry standards including XML (Extensible Markup Language), SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), Java and J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition), all of which HP supports, also played a role, it said.

The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal, which is subject to customary closing conditions, HP said.

Privately held TruLogica, based in Dallas, is not the only acquisition HP plans in this field this year. It announced two other deals last month, one of which is already complete. HP plans to buy Novadigm Inc. of Mahwah, New Jersey, for around $122 million, and bought Consera Software of Bellevue, Washington, for an undisclosed sum. Novadigm will bring HP an automated system configuration management tool, while Consera's software will add to OpenView's IT resources mapping capabilities.