HP Enterprise to buy SimpliVity for $859m

Hewlett Packard Enterprise will buy privately held cloud company SimpliVity for US$650 million (A$859 million) in cash, as it looks to expand in the fast-growing market for hybrid cloud platforms.

The deal is expected to add to HPE's earnings in the first fiscal year after it is completed, the company said. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of HPE's 2017 fiscal year.

"This transaction expands HPE's software-defined capability and fits squarely within our strategy to make hybrid IT simple for customers," HPE CEO Meg Whitman said in a statement.

"More and more customers are looking for solutions that bring them secure, highly resilient, on-premises infrastructure at cloud economics. That's exactly where we're focused."

SimpliVity is the second biggest player in the hyperconverged infrastructure appliance space behind leader Nutanix - a partner of HPE competitor Dell/EMC.

The combined HPE-SimpliVity product portfolio will span hyperconverged, 3PAR storage, composable infrastructure, and multi-cloud offerings, HPE said.

It said it would continue to offer its own existing HC 380 and HC 250 hyperconverged products to current customers and partners, but not to new clients.

In the months following the completion of the deal, HPE said it would go to market with the SimpliVity Omni Stack software for its ProLiant DL380 servers.

"Looking forward, HPE customers can expect to see their hyperconverged experience continue to improve with new innovations like "workspace" controls, which provide business leaders and developers with simple self-service portals to compose virtualised and containerised resources, and accelerate application development and deployment," the company said.

"Additionally, HPE will provide enhanced business insight, including predictive analytics, which will give IT managers the tools they need to increase resource utilisation and proactively respond to needs for new resources."

Reports first began emerging that HPE was considering Simplivity as a takeover target in November last year.

US-based SimpliVity was founded in 2009 and had raised US$276 million in four funding rounds, according to Crunchbase.

With Reuters