HP finally wins out over Dell in the 3PAR bidding war

It looks like it is finally over this time, with Hewlett-Packard declaring victory over Dell in the acquisition bidding war for 3PAR, maker of systems and software for data storage and information management.

3PAR is the owner of many intellectual property rights in the area of enterprise storage, as well as a producer of a wide range of enterprise storage products, including hardware disk arrays and storage management software. 3PAR first shipped their flagship InServ storage server in September 2002. 3PAR’s primary competitors in the enterprise storage market are EMC Corporation, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. 3PAR has been called a “pioneer and champion” for thin provisioning, a mechanism to improve the utilization efficiency of storage capacity deployment. 3PAR first announced this capability in June 2002 and shipped it to customers in 2003.

About two weeks ago, Dell Computer announced that it was buying 3PAR in an acquisition valued at approximately $1.15 billion. About a week later, HP announced that it was offering $1.5 billion (33% higher than Dell’s offer) to acquire 3PAR. A few days after that 3PAR said that it had accepted Dell’s revised offer for a price of approximately $1.6 billion. The next day, both parties increased the amounts of their bids, with Hewlitt-Packard’s above the $2 billion mark. Yesterday, Dell decided not to continue to bid after HP upped the ante to $2.4 billion, which was the final sale price according to a CNET story.

This may have been a situation wherein Hewlett-Packard saw an oportunity to both purchase the technology of a major competitor (3PAR) and stop a new company (Dell) from entering this very competitive and lucrative marketplace. 3PAR’s innovations in the storage arena essentially allowed the company to provide instant, on-demand allocations for storage, either in the enterprise or in the cloud, not committing storage until data was actually written, providing essentially just-in-time provisioning of storage space.

• 

• HP follows in Intel’s footsteps by buying security firm
• Dell to buy Perot Systems for $3.9 billion
• Consumers finally vindicated, Dell charged with fraud, bad business
• Dell delays annual filing, finds evidence of misconduct in finance probe
• Dell and HP back Microsoft against ruling to ban Word in the U.S.