Hewlett-Packard mulls new acquisitions

ORLANDO, - Hewlett-Packard Co. aims to buy two small software companies, filling holes as it moves to expand its systems management software strategy, Chairman and Chief Executive Carly Fiorina said on Tuesday.

"We will make a couple more acquisitions is my belief, relatively small ones to plug holes," Fiorina told an audience of corporate technology buyers, seeking to convince the audience of the coherence of H-P's emerging software strategy.

She declined to name the companies or specify what specific products or features her company was after in the deals.

Fiorina was responding to a question from a Gartner technology analyst during a keynote address to thousands of corporate and government technology buyers attending Gartner Inc.'s annual Symposium ITXpo technology conference in Orlando, Florida .

In September, HP agreed to buy Talking Blocks of San Francisco in a cash deal, the third in string of small software and services companies it has arranged to buy since July.

Talking Blocks develops code that helps knit together business software systems from HP and other software developers, including rivals IBM, BEA and Sun Microsystems.

HP will both sell Talking Blocks software separately and combine it with OpenView, HP's flagship systems management software line, which is designed to help companies monitor and detect trouble in machines running throughout an organization.

Talking Blocks makes a category of software that aims to help corporate customers understand how specific technology resources -- such as computers, databases, data storage, and other machinery -- affect a business's overall performance.

The deal to absorb Talking Blocks follows deals to acquire Extreme Logic, a computer services company and Select Access, an identity management software system from Irish security company Baltimore Technologies.

® Reuters