HPE and SimpliVity may be at church door Meg Whitman’s big storage play could soon be realised with sources claiming Hewlett Packard Enterprise is to bid between $3.8bn to $3.9bn for Simplivity. SimpliVity is the number two startup in the hyper-converged infrastructure appliance (HCIA) market which, in turn, is the strongest growth market in storage. Dell-EMC is the …
This could be HP's worst acquisition ever... especially at $3-4B. Why would you pay a 30x to 40x multiple on a struggling unprofitable company that did $95 million in bookings??? No way they should pay more than $1B, and they should be able to pick them up for way less than that. Now HP's underlying store virtual product is showing it's age and a bit of a force for HCI, so i guess they need to do something to remain relevant, but Simplivity isn't the answer.
It would make a lot of sense for both parties. Simplivity has solid technology but losing ground to VX:Rail and Nutanix whilst HPE has the largest x86 installed base and their own efforts on hyper converged have been too little too late. HPE integrated both LeftHand and 3PAR into their core business successfully, no reason for Simplivity not to become a roaring success as well.
Yes but lefthand was a good deal at only $360M, for a company with 11,000 nodes installed at the time. Plus they haven't really put much effort into the core product, not counting the continuous re-packaging exercises. I'm sure they have made many multipliers on that investment over the last 8 years. How long before they even get their initial investment back on ~$4B for simplivity??
Whilst the market for external arrays is most certainly changing, its demise is hardly likely to happen in my lifetime in the same way that tapes haven't disappeared. Nimble, and some others, are comfortably taking business from the likes of HPE, NetApp, EMC et al, so wouldnt you want something which is growing in a stagnant pond or keep holding onto the decaying lily pad which is about to become next year's compost.
Are you saying that all vendors should ignore this $20b+ market because something else shiny has emerged which has turned analysts heads? Its a bit like saying that BMW should stop developing its highly successful diesel and petrol vehicles because some people are buying electric? No, they continue to develop and enhance their existing range (and acquiring where a gap exists - Mini) whilst developing in areas for the future, which may or may not be electric or hydrogen fuel cells. The analogy is even more pertinent when you consider that electric is not ready for everyone yet due to charge inconvenience, cost of acquisition and range issues. HCI has similar drawbacks as it is costly at scale, has intrinsic complexities which are undisclosed during the sales cycles such a scalability, os/firmware updates and has inconsistent performance during node/s outages.
When electric power vehicles become mature and the above issues are removed then they are truly an evolution for so many reasons. HCI on the other hand, whilst currently relevant to a small subset of workloads or customers who like new things, is not a leap forward and the only perceived advantages such as linear scale and simplicity are not benefits the customers actually sees and are certainly not a sensible trade-off for the disadvantages (see NetApp cDOT as a case study of a company forcing customers down a route it feels is needed and not what the customer asked for). Both of these 'advantages' are available in modern, well designed systems already.
Anyway, isnt HCI just the polished turd son of DAS? Emperors new clothes, anyone?
:)
As a competitor to both HP and Simplivity, I just pray this deal is real and goes forward!
Simplivity with an installed base on Dell and Cisco and struggling to survive would piss off all their (tiny) installed base and HP who is struggling to survive for long time paying almost 4B for this!
Is like adding one more nail in each of their coffins!
Oh Please make it happen!
>There has to be a possibility that Lenovo will now look for a closer relationship with an HCIA software >vendor
Lenovo has a close partnership with Nutanix already and sells the Nutanix software as part of the Lenovo HX solutions, as well as having a meet-in-the-channel relationship with SimpliVity.
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