HP calls for Irish ISVs to join up


6 May 2004

The head of HP’s software partnering programme has said that the company is seeking more open code software companies to consider joining its partner programme for ISVs (independent software vendors). Already two Irish companies, Am-beo and Vordel, have used the programme to increase their market reach as well as score major deals in collaboration with HP.

Karl-Heinz Pritz, EMEA software partners director, told siliconreublic.com: “We are seeking to work with these kind of companies with niche applications. For them it extends their reach considerably and for HP it adds to our complete array of applications that we can offer when targeting various sectors like telecoms and finance. In the past year we have signed up more than 50 open code partners and have developed a new technology platform, the Open Code Multimedia Platform, to include innovative technologies with our technologies.

“There are lots of business cases where we could use applications from ISVs,” Pritz said. He added that some successful ISV collaborations have led to HP actually acquiring companies for their technologies, citing last year’s acquisition by HP of Pipe Beach, an ISV specializing in voice-based XML technologies. “That was an example of a company that filled a gap in our technology family very well.”

Pritz emphasised that the company was after “quality, not quantity”, and said that deficiencies in the provision of finance-based systems were particularly open for exploration. Technologies and applications developed by ISVs would be rigorously tested at HP’s application infrastructure in Lyon, France.

Last year, Irish e-security firm Vordel played an instrumental role in enabling HP win a CAN$2bn outsourcing contract to manage the IT resources for the Canadian Imperial Bank Corporation (CIBC). Key to the deal was Vordel’s XML-based Secure Partner Integration Solution, which the company developed specifically for the financial services market, and worked in partnership with HP to install on HP servers based on the new Intel Itanium 2 architecture.

Earlier last year the company joined forces with HP, Intel and Microsoft to create the Vordel Secure Partner Integration Solution, which is the first comprehensively secure web services solution available on the market.

Vordel’s technology provides the required link between web services technologies, existing security technologies, providing authentication, authorisation, accounting and content validation for XML (extensible mark-up language) based communications. The company has headquarters in Dublin and offices in Boston and London.

By John Kennedy