I heard a rumour they were talking to Neverfail - www.neverfailgroup.com - about a potential purchase... not sure why though...

...Teradata.

I have a hard time following all the HP purchases and new software suites. Someone needs to take an axe to some of the replicated deadwood in the HP Software business, before it becomes the Mr Creosote of IT. And definitely sort out the licensing, please!

I can't see the HP Software juggernaut stopping any time soon - they have the money, the market is ripe for consolidation, and they have the support of the board. I hear at least one rumour a week about who's next on their hitlist. I actually think the Teradata solution would place HP in conflict with two partners, Oracle and Sybase, and that HP can still make plenty of money supplying the platform for Teradata without antagonising Larry or John.

Microstrategy would make sense, it wouldn't seem to conflict with any existing big partners too badly, and could be built into the OpenView mantra of "monitor, analyse and report without impacting platform independence". But I haven't heard of any eagerness from Mike and Sanju to join the Hurd herd.

Teradata will be on the list - sooner rather than later, I fear. And, just as when Teradata bought Britton-Lee back in 1991, the purchase won't be as much for the customer base (although the Teradata customer base is pretty impressive - and pretty unassailable) as it will be for the technology pieces that HP needs to make NeoView the "new" Teradata. Optimizer, BiNet switch, and, most critically, the expertise in building single-view DSS/OLTP data warehouses that sophisticated data mining can be applied to even while the day-to-day business processing takes place.

Remember, the key for HP, IBM, SUN, etc. is to get everything important BACK into the data center and into a single data store for the entire enterprise. (The old "One Ring to Rule Them..." saw.) Adding the purchase of Micro Strategy to this would be a fantastic one-two punch, as it would give HP the tools for doing the user interface and analysis as well as the DW in a single package.

The combination of these companies, along with HP's already impressive server install base, would give them the "hat trick" of everything in the data center - and, with their PC business - everything on the desktop.

"All your data are belong to HP..."

After beers with a bunch of former and current employees, its not Happy Valley any more, especially after the recent sweep of redundancies. The impression they conveyed to me is it is all felt just like a house getting spring cleaned and renovated prior to a quick sale....