HP Snaps Up 3PAR For $2 Billion

adeelarshad82 writes "The bidding war between HP and Dell has reached a swift and dramatic conclusion. One could even say HP sniped the auction at the last minute — to the tune of $2 billion for the acquisition of data storage provider 3PAR. HP's not-so-subtle efforts to pull the company away from a preliminary merger agreement with Dell — a $1.15-billion arrangement announced August 16 — took three successive bids to reach an ultimate conclusion. The final acquisition cost of $2 billion, confirmed by 3PAR late Friday, represents a price of $30 per share of 3PAR stock. That's triple the closing price of the company's stock before Dell's initial offer was made public, and more than double after."

Re:Why?

[TamCaP]

I was thinking the same thing. I have recently finished Graham's book "The Intelligent Investor", and buying a company for $2bn that has not even once generated any profit is like straight out of the chapter "what to watch out for". A very speculative move, especially by a company without a CEO. Not to mention that bidding is not yet completely over, right?

Re:Why?

[shmlco]

3Par has technology and patents on "light provisioning" systems, that enables disk space to be allocated only when applications need capacity, greatly reducing IT management costs. Think of it as storage on a just-enough and just-in-time basis.

But basically it's because ex-CEO Hurd killed HP's R&D budget. With no R&D, HP is attempting to buy its way into the next big thing.

Hurd deserved to go. Killing off R&D to the point where you have to spend billions buying your way back into the game smacks of a certain lack of foresight and intelligence, does it not?

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/29/behind-the-bidding-war-the-real-reasons-why-hp-and-dell-are-so-desperate-for-3par/ [techcrunch.com]?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

IBM or not...

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM's storage is rebrand happy.

If it begins with DS, it's really just Engenio.

If it begins with N, it's really just NetApp.

If it begins with DCS, it's really DataDirect.

If it is XIV, it's really and truly IBM.

So chances are your SAN experience is just some other not-quite-so-big name in the market with IBM's logo slapped on and either some horrible Director integration attempt or the vendor's tools with IBM's logo on em.

IBM does do their own servers pretty much across the board, but they haven't exactly been growing original, in-house networking or storage efforts. Kind of a shame since a lot of really interesting stuff could be done if some vendor coherently implemented all the components as one.

IBM's apparent disinterest in 3par is due to some promising efforts out of their internal research devision.