This article was updated with the latest news on sept 2th at 15.50 (CET)
The story is ended: Dell didn’t respond to the latest call for the 3Par bid and HP officially won for a total price of 2.4B$! Indeed, the 3Par press release is very strange (read third paragraph) but analysts and bloggers all bet on HP for the win.
As you know, after a first official bid from Dell in the mid of august, we saw something like an ebay auction for 3Par where Dell and HP battled. Now the game has come close to an end and we may wonder about what this acquisition means:
The good for HP-Dell-3Par
- HP has a new best of breed technology in enterprise storage. They will own a strong, sexy and competitive product to sell in the high end enterprise storage segment and the technology to design a scaled down version to definitively kill the sluggish EVA storages.
- Dell didn’t spend 2B$ for 3Par: very costly for a new entry in the enterprise storage market segment and wouldn’t be easy to explain investors how to quickly monetize their investments! They did a great job with Equallogic but they have a big presence in SMB market with a consolidated sales model but we can’t say the same for the enterprise storage market.
- The good news for 3Par is the finale price: 2.4B$! I can say only WOW here.
The bad for HP-Dell-3Par
- Hitachi won’t wait to lose customers… they will propose directly to customers the evolution of their next generation USP (highly awaited) and some of them will remain with HDS.
- Dell shown clearly his plans to the world, what will do EMC in the near future? They will try to extend their presence in every Dell/EMC deal/account to diminish Dell, for sure.
- HP is famous for their acquisitions and a lot of questions comes to my mind: will 3Par engineers stay in HP? will the product be developed at its best? how much time HP will need to integrate 3Par in its offering? and other questions rising about EVA customers: one above all, will they wait for 3Par?
The ugly for HP-Dell-3Par
- HP owns an high-end product now and I don’t know if 3Par has a ready scaled down version of his products to stay in the low-end EVA-like market. If not, Engineering of new small models will take time and EVA customers will be heavily attacked by all other vendors in the meantime!
- Dell guys failed one of the most important acquisitions in their career, now they need to carefully plan their next moves in enterprise data storage (many people point out to Compellent) to enable their cloud computing strategy… or they risk to miss the train.
- 3Par employees will not have a great future in HP… especially sales and administrative people.
