HP completes $2.35 billion 3Par merger

HP has completed its $2.35 billion merger with 3Par, just weeks after thwarting rival Dell in a bidding war for the storage vendor, HP announced Monday.

HP has completed its $2.35 billion merger with 3Par, just weeks after thwarting rival Dell in a bidding war for the storage vendor, HP announced Monday.

Dell seemed to have a deal in place to buy 3Par for $1.15 billion in mid-August, but HP quickly outbid Dell, eventually doubling the initial price.

Tech M&A deals of 2010

The HP/Dell bidding war was a near replica of last year's struggle between EMC and NetApp to acquire Data Domain, ultimately won by EMC with a bid of more than $2 billion. In both cases, the bigger vendor was able to outfox its smaller competitor.

Both acquisitions illustrate that tech vendors expect the market for more efficient storage technologies to grow considerably as the IT world moves heavily into virtualization.

"3PAR brings market-differentiating technology to HP that will enable clients to maximize storage utilization, balance workloads and automate storage tiering," HP said. "This allows clients to improve productivity and more efficiently operate their storage networks."

HP was able to pull off the 3Par acquisition while dealing with chaos surrounding the resignation of CEO Mark Hurd.

The 3Par buy is just a fraction of the size of HP's $13.9 billion deal for EDS two years ago, but the two acquisitions are complementary. Analysts expect "HP's Enterprise Services unit, formerly EDS, to aggressively sell 3Par products," as Computerworld's Lucase Mearian reports.

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