Hewlett-Packard To Acquire AppIQ

Hewlett-Packard on Monday said it has inked a deal to acquire AppIQ, a provider of storage area network (SAN) solutions. Terms of the sale were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2005.

AppIQ sells both SAN and storage resource management (SRM) solutions, which are used to simplify the management of storage infrastructure. AppIQ favors an open standards approach to that technology. To that end, it has recently promoted the OpenIQ program, which it bills as a community initiative aimed at promoting and accelerating the development of standards-based management applications according to a common set of specifications and programming interfaces. That would enable SAN solutions to work out of the box from a wide range of storage hardware.

AppIQ's acquisition by HP may have been presaged in part by an earlier OEM and joint-development partnership it had made with the computing giant. That deal made AppIQ's solutions available as part of HP "storage essentials" offerings

AppIQ's solutions are similarly offered under by Hitachi Data Systems, under a partnership and OEM agreement. AppIQ also recently touted a deal it received with MCI to manage the telcom providers on-demand storage service.

AppIQ is headquartered in Burlington, Mass., AppIQ with 135 employees. The company said it had approximately 250 customers as well as offices in the U.K., Hong Kong, Singapore and India.