When Iain Hawke, Country Manager for TOWER Software in New Zealand heard that I was going to be in Canberra today, he suggested that I meet up with Geoff Moore, the General Manager for TOWER Software in Asia Pacific. This was before the announcement that HP had announced an intent to acquire the company, but the breakfast went ahead nonetheless. And as it went ahead, the ideas behind the acquisition dominated our discussion.

Here’s the key points:

1. HP has announced an “intent to acquire” the company. They are involved in due diligence at the moment — indeed, the TOWER offices in Canberra are swarming with members of the HP mergers and acquisitions team. If everything lines up, it is expected that HP will make a formal offer around May 1.

2. If HP makes a formal offer, it is pretty certain that the acquisition will go through. TOWER has three directors, and between them they own 90% of the company. There is a “come along” clause in the TOWER constitution that says that if people owning 90% of the shares vote to proceed with an acquisition, the remaining 10% of the shareholders are “pulled along”. So, it’s a pretty certain thing.

3. The acquisition is mainly about HP bulking out its enterprise software line. HP currently has nothing in its portfolio to compare with TOWER’s TRIM offering, so the product is highly complementary. In addition, TOWER has created an integration to one of the archiving solutions from HP, so HP will be able to use TRIM to drive adoption of what it already offers. Geoff made the comment that just like EMC acquired Documentum to drive storage sales, so HP is doing the same with TOWER.

4. HP wants the TOWER staff. Actually, one of the stipulations of the acquisition is that 85% of the TOWER staff will sign up.

5. There is a SharePoint angle to the acquisition. TOWER offers a couple of ways of integrating TRIM with SharePoint document libraries, and for organizations that have both, the SharePoint user interface can therefore be used for the creation of documents and business content, but the compliance, records management and e-discovery roles will be handled by TRIM.

6. Geoff is keenly aware that if the acquisition goes through, there will be a lot of potential and opportunity to work with HP and the HP sales infrastructure on TRIM opportunities. He notes that the biggest challenge will be realizing the potential, and we talked this through for a while.

7. Finally, the acquisition will represent a major change for Geoff. He’s been at TOWER since 1990 (when he joined as a trainer), and it’s a small company (200) in comparison to the 170,000 full time employees and 100,000 contractors at HP.

It was a neat discussion, and it was great to put a face to a name. To top it off, I even got a ride in Geoff’s Lotus (although after driving a Ford Transit, I really did feel like I was sitting on the road!)