The deal, which is subject to approvals from Peregrine shareholders and regulators, values Peregrine at $26.08 per share. The HP offer amounts to a $6.98 premium over the closing price of company shares Friday. In trading late this morning, Peregrine shares jumped by $6.30 on the news.

In a separate deal, HP announced plans to buy storage resource management (SRM) vendor AppIQ Inc. for an undisclosed amount, part of an effort to create a single management interface for all HP server and storage products. Burlington, Mass.-based AppIQ makes standards-based storage management software that monitors and automates the provisioning of disk capacity across servers, software applications and heterogeneous storage-area networks (SAN).

HP expects to close on the Peregrine deal no later than the first quarter of 2006.

"The timing was right to pursue Peregrine," Todd DeLaughter, vice president and general manager of HP's management software business, said in an interview. "As part of the build-out of our Adaptive Enterprise strategy, one key category we wanted to cover was asset management."

With Peregrine's AssetManager software, "we're clearly putting the keys to the IT safe firmly back in the hands of the CIO," so CIOs can keep a close eye on asset management within their organizations, he said.