FRAMINGHAM (07/07/2000) - The wooing of top information technology and business managers by Hewlett-Packard Co. continued this week with HP's announcement that it would offer enterprise-level software distribution through an alliance with Novadigm Inc. in Emeryville, California.
HP's equity investment in Novadigm amounts to 5% ownership, said Novadigm CEO Albion Fitzgerald. Technology-sharing between the two firms will let Novadigm's Radia software distribution tool share digital asset data with HP's OpenView software, he said.
The two companies will develop a migration path for firms using HP's software distribution tools to upgrade to Radia, said Chuck Smith, general manager for OpenView desktop and software management operations.
HP's tool, Desktop Administrator, which was acquired from Symantec Corp., "isn't scalable to the tens of thousands of desktops" that large enterprises need, said Philip Mendoza, an analyst at International Data Corp. in Framingham, Massachusetts.
Top managers usually concern themselves with end-to-end management, whereas IT managers focus on managing their departments and on the tools that help them do it, Mendoza said.
For Karole Johns, director of end-user support for the financial software development group at Thomson Financial Services in Rockville, Maryland, HP's Desktop Administrator wasn't in the running. With more than 1,000 local, remote and mobile users, integration with asset management software was as important as scalability, she said.