HP Snaps Up 3PAR For $2 Billion 68
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the only-knows-it-must-feed dept.
from the only-knows-it-must-feed dept.
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? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
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]?
Re:First post (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I the only one that sees this "In the cloud" feeding frenzy as just as damned stupid as the "On the Internet" dotbomb we had in the late 90s? After all we are seeing companies throwing insane money on a technology that requires all the ISPs to upgrade their infrastructure and STILL offer fair pricing whereas if we have learned anything from the greedy duopolies is that it is far more likely they will simply install caps rather than let go of any of their precious profits.
I have a feeling all the "In the cloud" supporters are gonna get a REALLY nasty wake up call when most of the ISPs start capping the hell out of everyone and their customers take one look at their Internet bill and say "screw that!". Betting the farm on someone else, whom you don't control, building the infrastructure your service requires is just plain stupid IMHO. No different than that OnLive or whatever its called betting folks are gonna have enough bandwidth to play AAA quality titles by just streaming the whole thing. Might work in Asia, where 100Mbit connections are the norm, but here in the USA where 2Mbit lines with caps are all too common all this "In the cloud" stuff is gonna blow chunks.
IBM or not... (Score:1, Interesting)
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.