Add to cartIn what appears to be a reaction to the success of the IBM Software Group, HP reconstituted a software unit over the 2005-2007 period and emphasized software company acquisitions. These acquisition have been mostly spread across HP’s enterprise, personal and imaging/printing business units and appear to have been undertaken for tactical reasons. But a few of the acquisitions form the strategic underpinning of development and marketing efforts that had been disbanded and downgraded during the early part of this decade.
HP’s effort, however, is really a mishmash of information technology lifecycle management (ITLM) offerings plus unrelated tactical acquisitions that cannot be considered a return to the software market. Unlike IBM, HP does not manage its software development or marketing as a cohesive segment.
To reach this conclusion, Research 2.0’s Enterprise 2.0 software research theme took the same approach it took with IBM in its report released in July 2007: look at HP’s disparate software businesses as if they were a separate legal entity. Unlike IBM, HP has no software “cash cow” revenue flow to depend upon. As a result, the HP software business segment’s revenue growth is slower than Research 2.0’s estimate of the ITLM software market (based on select set of suppliers). And HP’s overall software sales (estimating sales revenue buried in the other business units in addition to reported “HP Software” revenue) is even slower.