Today, HP announced their acquisition of Mercury Interactive.

HP today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to purchase Mercury Interactive Corp., a leading IT management software and services company, through a cash tender offer for $52.00 per share, or an enterprise value of approximately $4.5 billion, which is net of existing cash and debt.

This comes after the acquisition of Peregrine in September 2005.

HP portfolio in the Business Service Management, Enterprise consolidation and optimization is now very comprehensive.

In a recent post titled OMC Should Drive a New Systems Management Taxonomy, the author makes the case for the creation of a taxonomy to classify and describe the various open source projects that the Open Management Consortium (OMC) is hosting.

This is a good idea, but I would have the following remarks :

• There should be an agreement to use a common glossary, like the version 3 of the ITIL Glossary.
• A common functional model for the OMC should be developed, and each product mapped to it, or classified in the taxonomy. I’m referring to a model like the one I developed, and published in this post. It might not be perfect, and could be definitely improved and adapted, but I found it to be a good base.
• The taxonomy should be created based on a data center management operational model, aligned with customers functional requirements.
• When this mapping is done, the consortium should drive a integration strategy to resolve overlaps and gaps, as well as defining a common integration and interoperability framework. Quite often, open source projects are duplicating efforts because there is no overall strategy, or agreements between projects, and since there is a limited supply of community members, they should be directed to maximize their impact.

So, to answer the questions in the post :

And so I’d like to get a read from the other members of the OMC, and from visitors that may not yet be participants (you can join by going to: http://open-management.com/join/) as to whether they: A) agree that such a taxonomy is needed and, B) will commit to using it to describe their projects, assuming that we establish in advance the rules for discussing and deciding what the taxonomy would be.

A : yes, the taxonomy is needed, but see my points above.

B: I cannot commit since I do not represent a member of the OMC, but this requirement is making a lot of sense.

I hope that the discussion on this taxonomy or functional map will be performed in an open forum, and I would happily contribute.