HP to Buy Green IT Consultant

HP is looking to expand its storage services story by acquiring privately held consulting firm EYP Mission Critical Facilities for an undisclosed fee.

The New York-based consulting firm designs and builds large-scale data centers, specializing in power and cooling issues, something that is fast becoming an integral part of vendors' storage pitches.

Despite a flurry of marketing spiel from vendors, users have complained that there is currently no silver bullet for solving their data center power woes, citing the need to juggle an array of different products and solutions.

By using EYP to target companies at the data center planning stage, HP claims that it will help solve many of these issues.

"This is about helping customers deal with their next-generation data center, designing it and building it," says Brian Brouillette, vice president of HP technology services. "HP today has tremendous strength in servers, storage, and networks, but what we have not had before is the ability to talk with a client much further upstream."By getting a foot in the door at the design phase, HP is clearly looking for an opportunity to sell its own storage wares into enterprise data centers, although Brouillette downplayed this aspect of the deal when he spoke to Byte and Switch today.

"We will clearly talk to them about HP, but that's not why we're doing this," says the exec, explaining that the deal was driven by a desire to offer "end-to-end" facilities management.

The vendor is also getting its hands on a EYP's sizeable client base. The consulting firm has so for racked up around 500 customers for its services, including big-name financial firms such as American Express and BNP Paribas.

It also seems likely that HP will draw on the consulting firm's expertise around power and cooling and build that into future versions of its own green solutions.

The vendor's energy efficiency offering is called Dynamic Smart Cooling, which uses sensors attached to servers and storage gear to monitor air temperatures and create computer-generated thermal data center "maps."Last month, in an attempt to demonstrate the value of the technology, HP announced that it has fitted 7,500 sensors from EYP to its R&D center in Bangalore, India.

HP's Brouillette acknowledges that today's deal will lead to product enhancements. "Keep your eyes open in this space -- we have some interesting things coming," he says.

The bulk of EYP's 350 employees will now be joining HP, including EYP chairman Steve Einhorn and his management team.

The deal is the latest in a string of recent HP M&A deals, which include this summer's $1.6 billion acquisition of Opsware and the $214 million purchase of thin-client specialist Neoware.

HP's acquisition of EYP is expected to close in the first quarter of next year.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.