Dell and HP have once again traded bids as they tussle over storage outfit 3PAR. On Friday morning, Dell matched HP's Thursday bid of $27 a share, and HP promptly re-upped the ante with a $30 a share bid, valuing 3PAR at $2 billion. Meanwhile, shares in the Fremont, California-based 3PAR jumped to $32.46, a more than 235 per …

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Saturday 28th August 2010 18:11 GMT Matt Bryant

Hmmmm.

Whilst you could argue whether 3PAR are worth $2bn, both companies seem to be painting themselves into corners. Dell is beginning to sound like it desperately needs to buy a high-end array company, even though the current EMC OEM deal would seem more than acceptable, which means losing the bidding war would make them look "incomplete". Meanwhile, hp has just lost a CEO in a most embarrassing manner, and needs the good news of defeating Dell to keep the shareholders smiling. How long those shareholders will remain happy as the bidding war reaches silly money prices remains to be seen. A Pyrrhic victory could await hp if Dell simply goes back to EMC, and the same goes for Dell if it ends up having to borrow too much to fund a purchase. Seems like 3PAR's timing was either very lucky or very clever.

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1. Monday 30th August 2010 04:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Cash
  
  Both Dell and HP have more than enough cash to buy 3PAR without having to borrow any money.
  
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2. Tuesday 31st August 2010 09:08 GMT FreeTard
  
  Don't quite get it
  
  Dell own Equalogic right... and they are not exactly rubbish at SAN. iSCSI is far morecost effective and with 10Gbit ethernet there feck all perf difference.
  
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Monday 30th August 2010 04:48 GMT Anonymous Coward

The Worrying Thing.....

.....for the 3PAR workers must be that HP will win this war, as it follows that there will be significant redundancies. Somehow I can't see HP losing this one, not only do they have more wonga in the bank to see off Dell but they do come across as being awfully keen to do the deal to spite Dell, whereas Dell are also keen - but more inclined to do the deal for strategic business reasons.

I wonder what Bill and Dave would have made of the BoD's raiding the company piggy bank in the absence of the boss? More to the point, what would Hurd have done here? You kind of get the impression from the timing that Hurd might not have been up for this deal, so they knifed Hurd in the back to do the deal.

Paris because the stupid bint has got herself arrested for carrying banned drugs (I guess it's better than her being arrested whilst pregnant, then she would have been done for carrying dope).

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Monday 30th August 2010 04:48 GMT Andrew Barratt

mmmm

Sounds like some one has been sucking up the cloud computing cool aid.

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Monday 30th August 2010 16:27 GMT Anonymous Coward

Choice of evils

Whilst 3Par will definitely benefit from the broader/larger platform HP or Dell can provide, this cracking kit will still struggle in the hands of such inept sales teams. HP need to transition away from the EVA but will not have the raw balls to do this stuff justice; Dell still struggle to have credibility in the DC/Enterprise space, regardless of their best endeavours. EMC will be laughing all the way to the Leeds.............

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Monday 30th August 2010 21:10 GMT Anonymous Coward

Stuff and nonsense

There is a lot of junk being thrown around here.

Firstly I don't see why there will be redundancies at 3PAR if HP won. Thinking back to the Left Hand acquisition, noone was made redundant. In fact, HP are recruiting heavily and boosting the numbers of sales people at the moment so the 3PAR sales team would merely add to this. The only areas HP has made redundances is in services which is the state of play with every single provider on the planet. How can companies sell management tools to customers that allow them to do more with less, automate, etc and not use these tools themselves. It's unfortunate that these things are just less manually intensive than they used to be.

Plus I doubt EMC will be laughing on the back of this. EMC are in a difficult position moving forward. Yes, they are currently the dominant storage vendor but the lines between storage and servers are blurring and it's all well and good having a r'ship with Cisco but r'ships come and go, and also Cisco have almost no market share anyway. The likes of HP, IBM and Dell if they manage to acquire a suitable storage offering, all own the stack from top to bottom. Well HP do and the other 2 almost do. This creates a huge position of strength. Sounds like IBM have something big to announce on October 7th and HP are relentless in their talk of Converged Infrastructure so EMC will need something a bit more than a partnership longer term. Cisco to buy EMC!

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Monday 30th August 2010 21:10 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward

@The Worrying Thing

The Worrying Thing is that HP are having to pay over the odds for somebody capable of putting disks in boxes - because the departing CEO fired almost their entire R+D staff, except for the ones that left in disgust when he was appointed.

Now they will acquire this new inventive company and fire their R+D staff to enhance shareholder value - then repeat.

If only there was an alternative, like HP having some ability to "invent" in-house!

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Tuesday 31st August 2010 00:14 GMT rpcohen

Time for Dell to leave it to HP

Dell should pull out of the bidding war and leave HP stuck with paying $2B for 3PAR. Afterwards, they can pick up an 'also-ran' vendor for about a half that price. Quite the bargain!

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Tuesday 31st August 2010 09:43 GMT Anonymous Coward

Makes sense for HP

HP may be looking to play with EMC and HDS at their level - HP have gone far too long relying on other vendors kit for proper enterprise storage. If (big IF) HP do this right, they might just pull it off. Dell wouldn't have had a chance (outside the ever expanding fungal decay of Microsoft-stack luvvies) to achieve that.

I doubt there will be significant 3PAR layoffs - I'd be more worried if I was an HP storage systems designer tweaking 6-10 year old tech to keep it marketable, or built up a career with the re-badged HDS kit. (customer hint: find a back-channel to Hitachi if you want a proper understanding or support)

Nope - this is a good move for HP - the telling will be in whether they can deliver it old-skool HP style, and whether they can do it in a meaningful timeframe without just sticking HP badges on it.

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