HP to Acquire Tower

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- HP (NYSE:HPQ) and Tower Software today announced that they have signed a pre-bid agreement for HP to acquire Tower, a document and records management software company based in Canberra, Australia.

The deal will enable HP to expand its offerings in the fast-growing electronic discovery and compliance software market.

The acquisition of Tower will add electronic records management to HP Softwares existing e-discovery and compliance capabilities in information collection and retention. This includes both records management and identification,(1) which 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.

Under an existing alliance between the companies, Tower TRIM Context has been integrated with the HP Integrated Archive Platform to provide customers with a combined records management and compliance archiving solution.

Combining HP’s and Tower’s overall software capabilities will enable customers to rapidly 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.“In reaction to increased business regulation, electronic records management has moved from a back-office task to a business-critical function,” said Robin Purohit, vice president and general manager, Information Management, Software, HP. “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.”

Hewlett-Packard Co.