News

posted on 01 April 2008 05:32

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HP has agreed to buy Tower Software, based in Australia, for its records managemnt software, TRIM Context, which HP has integrated with its Integrated Archive Platform for compliance archiving.

Tower has more than 22 years of paper and electronic records management experience and serves approximately 1,000 customers with more than 780,000 users in 32 countries.

Records management and identification have become increasingly important for organizations due to rules and regulations such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts.

Robin Purohit, HP's Information Management VP and GM said: "In reaction to increased business regulation, electronic records management has moved from a back-office task to a business-critical function. The combination of the HP and Tower software portfolios is expected to be hugely beneficial to the legal and IT organizations of businesses all over the world.”

HP says that combining HP’s and Tower’s overall software capabilities will enable customers to identify electronic business records from general business communication, collect those business records in a scalable and high-performance archive platform, and preserve them for long-term future use in legal discovery or compliance activities.

A letter to Tower customers states: "This announcement benefits both TOWER Software and HP Software customers. TOWER Software's leading document and records management solution and expertise is expected to extend HP Software's e-discovery capabilities beyond information collection and retention to include document and records management as defined by the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (www.edrm.net). As a result, HP customers would be able to manage their electronic and paper records with a single enterprise records management solution, leveraging capabilities from TOWER Software, the HP Imaging and Printing business and HP Software."

A benefit of the acquisition should be that HP will be better able to address SharePoint use. Apparently content stored in Microsoft SharePoint is coming under increased scrutiny from litigators, legal counsels and compliance officers involved in legal discovery, corporate governance or regulatory compliance.

Brand Hoff, the founder of Tower Software, said: “This will mark a new era for Tower’s customers, employees and partners. I am pleased to fully support this transaction and encourage our Tower shareholders to accept HP’s offer, in the absence of a higher third-party offer.”

Financial terms were not disclosed. The deal is expected to complete by the end of June.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}