HP to Acquire Bristol Technology

Hewlett-Packard is building out its software and solutions management capabilities with the Feb. 5 acquisition of Bristol Technology.

Bristol, based in Danbury, Conn., develops two separate software suites, TransactionVision and Cross-Platform Solutions. TransactionVision enables companies to track and trace business process transactions, similar to monitoring packages as they are sent through the overnight delivery process. Cross-Platform Solutions, on the other hand, is development-focused software that helps users port Windows applications to Unix and Linux platforms.

In February 2005 Bristol received a patent for tracking and correlating business transactions. Titled “Method and apparatus for correlation of events in a distributed multi-system computing environment,” the patent has some 36 claims around the mechanics of collecting transactional event data and correlating the events into individual business transactions, and it serves as the basis for the Bristol’s TransactionVision product, according to Ramin Sayer, director of products at HP, in Palo Alto, Calif.

HP is also bolstering its storage virtualization and security offerings. Click here to read more.

Some of the key concepts involved in the patent include the use of middleware APIs as trace points for monitoring a distributed transaction across all tiers of the enterprise (a process that doesn’t touch the underlying application), and inter-middleware trace point correlation to enable the assembly of trace point events from different middleware technologies into a transaction flow, according to the company’s Web site.

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