3PAR had three suitors It's been the 3PAR bid shuffle; the company has been seeking to sell itself since early May and three potential acquirers were involved: Dell; HP and one other. SEC filings by both 3PAR and Dell outline a timeline of events leading up to the agreed offer by Dell to buy 3PAR. First of all, Dell and 3PAR had discussions around a …
Of course, a headline-grabbing acquisition goes a long way to deflecting press attention from the embarrassing departure of your much-heralded CEO. Buying 3PAR would punt the hp share price back up a few points.
And why can't EMC be Company C? I would have thought 3PAR would have approached EMC if just because they thought EMC would like to take out a potential competitor.
Why on earth would 3PAR punt themselves to EMC if they thought EMC's only motivation would be to wipe out a competitor? You don't sell yourself to someone who you think will just wind you up! Rather you sell yourself to someone who wants, needs or values what you can bring to the table which I think both Dell and HP do.
And I doubt HP would engage in an acquisition like this purely as a smokescreen. The Hurd thing already seems to have died down and it's very much business as usual. Besides, it sounds as if HP were talking to 3PAR for some time but got initially outplayed by Dell. Word on the street is that the 3PAR shareholders are up in arms about the way the company initially got into bed with Dell too easily anyway!
> Why on earth would 3PAR punt themselves to EMC if they thought EMC's only motivation would be to wipe out a competitor?
Creating value for stockholders is the lawful job for any board of directors. ""wants, needs or values what you can bring"" finishes as a distant second, if it can at all. Meaning that money on the table trumps all.
Why did HP buy Apollo Computers? To eliminate a competitor.
Why did GE buy Imatron Inc.? To eliminate a competitor.
Why did USA auto companies buy up the trolley lines in LA? To eliminate a competitor.
Why did Compaq buy Digital Equipment? To eliminate a competitor.
Why did Seagate buy Conner, Maxtor (hence MiniScribe and Quantum), and so on? To eliminate a competitor.
Why did Sun Microsystems buy Cobalt? (no-one knows...)
Why did Oracle buy Sun Microsystems? (wait and see...)
OK - I'll stop here.
Why did HP buy Compaq? (pc/server market share and the hubris of Fiorina)
Why did HP but StorageApps for $650m only to find that they had bought a re-boxed Dell server with some dodgy virtualiation interface and single digit installed customer base, none of whom were satisfied? (To stop EMC acquiring them and to line a few 'inside' pockets)
This is just corporate business, and yes it does deflect from Hurd's lascivious nature and greedy fiddling expenses.
The real joke is in HP adding yet another storage architecture; yet another choice for customers to become confused over; yet another small company to be poorly integrated (Hello Mercury, Hello Synstar, Hello Polyserve...etc) in the corporate giant in its quest to be more profitable than IBM.
Donnatelie really has no idea what he is dealing with in GarageLand. They'd be better placed spending some money tp motivate the HP staff, who used to be their best asset but many of whom are just free-wheeling nowadays.
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