Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is adding a significant storage solution provider to its portfolio with the acquisition of Nimble Storage.
HPE will pay $12.50 per share in cash (all figures USD), closing at $1.0 billion for the San Jose, California-based predictive all-flash and hybrid-flash storage solutions provider. Additionally, HPE will pay out Nimbler’s “unvested equity awards” of about $200 million at closing.
“Nimble Storage’s portfolio complements and strengthens our current 3PAR products in the high-growth flash storage market and will help us deliver on our vision of making Hybrid IT simple for our customers,” said Meg Whitman, president and CEO of HPE in a statement.
HPE plans to provide a full range of flash storage solutions for customers by tying in the current Nimble predictive flash offerings with complementary 3PAR solutions and affordable MSA products. This includes adding Nimble’s InfoSight Predictive Analytics platform across the entire HPE storage portfolio.
In its announcement, HPE identified a few key customer benefits that will come from this combined portfolio. They include:
- The ability to seamlessly move and replicate data across hybrid flash and all-flash storage to meet IT demand;
- Integrated data protection with application aware snapshots, encryption, replication and integration with independent software vendors;
- Easy data compaction and storage volume management to reduce capacity costs;
- Predictive support automation and full stack analytics to ensure predictable performance in hybrid IT deployments;
- Increased dedicated sales specialist support.
The announcement of this acquisition raises a few questions about Nimble’s other partnerships. For example, last October the storage provider made a deal with Lenovo that allowed the Chinese computing giant and its authorized partners to sell Nimble’s all-flash array and predictive analytics storage capabilities.
In response to the news, Lenovo’s Data Centre Group provided this statement to ITWC:
“Lenovo is aware of today’s news regarding the planned acquisition of Nimble Storage by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Change is continuous in our industry, so our strategy and operations are highly agile. We can adapt quickly to any market developments,” the company said.
“Lenovo announced the alliance with Nimble in October 2016 and the relationship was in its early stages. As such, there is virtually no impact on either our customers or product portfolio. Going forward, we will expand our efforts to bring the compelling benefits of flash-based storage to our customers, both in traditional data centre infrastructure and next-generation IT solutions. In fact, we plan to introduce new flash storage offerings later this year.”
The acquisition of Nimble Storage by HPE is expected to be completed in April.
