HP to Acquire Tower Software

HP (NYSE:HPQ) and Tower Software announced that they have signed a pre-bid agreement for HP to acquire Tower, a document and records management software company based in Canberra, Australia. The acquisition of Tower will add electronic records management to HP Software's existing e-discovery and compliance capabilities in information collection and retention. This includes both records management and identification. Under an existing alliance between the companies, Tower TRIM Context has been integrated with the HP Integrated Archive Platform to provide customers with a combined records management and compliance archiving solution. Combining HP's and Tower's overall software capabilities will enable customers to identify electronic business records from general business communication, collect those business records in a scalable and high-performance archive platform and preserve them for long-term future use in legal discovery or compliance activities. The addition of Tower also is expected to enable HP Software to address the Microsoft SharePoint compliance and e-discovery opportunities. The board of directors of Tower has unanimously approved the transaction and recommends that Tower shareholders accept HP's offer in the absence of a higher third-party offer. The acquisition will be conducted by means of an off-market takeover bid for all of the outstanding shares of Tower. The takeover is expected to close in the second quarter of calendar year 2008. More information is available at http://www.hp.com/go/tower