HP tops Dell's offer for 3PAR HP upped the ante in its battle with Dell last night- outbidding the direct seller's $24 a share offer for 3PAR with an offer of $27 a share - valuing 3PAR at $1.8bn. This is the fourth bid on the table as Dell and HP slug it out to gain control of 3PAR, the maker of highly-automated, virtualised and very efficient enterprise …
>However, Rakers said: "It is now less likely that Dell will return with a competitive bid for 3PAR."
Why? Last week some expert said that Dell's first offer was ridiculously high and 3PAR was overpriced, yet we've seen two higher bids since. It's not about the price anyway.
Also, considering that only Dell is entitled to a termination fee which goes up with the price ($72M after the latest Dell's offer, $53.5M for the previous bid), a higher bid (as long as HP is willing to win) would consequently hurt HP more.
As other comments noted, with every new bid HP's lack of confidence in their own storage offerings becomes more and more obvious.
HP doesn't have good FC-based disk array suitable the private cloud and virtualization.
I hope to see this bidding war continue so that we can see just how desperate HP is.
It seems to me that HP can't afford to lose this bid because their lack of confidence in the XP and EVA has now become public. Dell just needs to continue topping every HP's bid with a slightly higher price. If the price reaches $2B, Dell can give up and pocket close to $100M in termination fees - not bad!
It's either this or someone at HP is trying to score important career points and position himself/herself for a reorg that will happen after new CEO gets on board...
I wouldn't say this showed a lack of confidence in their existing product from HP. Nor would I say that the criticism about HP rebadging most of their storage products is fair - P2000 and XP are OEM'd but P4000, EVA, X9000, D2D, etc are all 100% HP products. This industry is awash with OEM r'ships so I would argue only EMC rebadges less than HP. IBM rebadge their DS3000, 4000, 5000, and nSeries. So essentially their entire low to midrange portfolio. Dell rebadge a load of EMC stuff, etc, etc. Rather than a lack of confidence this is an attempt by HP to move towards owning even more of their own portfolio. Donatelli, and more broadly HP's Converged Infrastructre strategy, is all about owning the IP at every part of the IT stack. P4000 and EVA play nicely into this strategy but HP don't have a high end, self owned product to support their CI strategy. 3PAR would give them that. Plus I would suspect this is part motivated by keeping 3PAR out of Dell's clutches. Dell are a long way from being a realistic competitor but 3PAR would immediately give them a credible mid and high end disk solution. Something they badly need and are limp as a competitor without. Whoever wins this 3PAR fight will end up selling a whole lot of these arrays!!
Good old Marc Farley, 3PAR blogger extraordinaire (www.stoagerap.com) will be adding another 15 feet to his yacht.
Still 3PAR released an outstanding product, offered many new features, took sales from the EMC/IBM/NETAPP/HDS sluggers, and managed to carve a niche in the enterprise storage area. Not easy.
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