HP Snaps Up 3PAR For $2 Billion

adeelarshad82 writes "The bidding war between HP and Dell has reached a swift and dramatic conclusion. One could even say HP sniped the auction at the last minute — to the tune of $2 billion for the acquisition of data storage provider 3PAR. HP's not-so-subtle efforts to pull the company away from a preliminary merger agreement with Dell — a $1.15-billion arrangement announced August 16 — took three successive bids to reach an ultimate conclusion. The final acquisition cost of $2 billion, confirmed by 3PAR late Friday, represents a price of $30 per share of 3PAR stock. That's triple the closing price of the company's stock before Dell's initial offer was made public, and more than double after."

Comments

First post

[Anonymous Coward]

OM NOM NOM NOM ACQUISITIONS

Re:First post

[Tetsujin]

So I guess it averages out to $666,666,666.67 per PAR?

Re:First post

[Tetsujin]

$666,666,666.67 for a PAR? How much would I get for a 20 over par?

$666,666,686.67, obviously...

Re:First post

[hairyfeet]

Am I the only one that sees this "In the cloud" feeding frenzy as just as damned stupid as the "On the Internet" dotbomb we had in the late 90s? After all we are seeing companies throwing insane money on a technology that requires all the ISPs to upgrade their infrastructure and STILL offer fair pricing whereas if we have learned anything from the greedy duopolies is that it is far more likely they will simply install caps rather than let go of any of their precious profits.

I have a feeling all the "In the cloud" supporters are gonna get a REALLY nasty wake up call when most of the ISPs start capping the hell out of everyone and their customers take one look at their Internet bill and say "screw that!". Betting the farm on someone else, whom you don't control, building the infrastructure your service requires is just plain stupid IMHO. No different than that OnLive or whatever its called betting folks are gonna have enough bandwidth to play AAA quality titles by just streaming the whole thing. Might work in Asia, where 100Mbit connections are the norm, but here in the USA where 2Mbit lines with caps are all too common all this "In the cloud" stuff is gonna blow chunks.

What the summary doesn't say:

[Z_A_Commando]

This article was written two days ago! Dell and 3PAR both confirmed that as part of Dell's original merger agreement (and each successive agreement) Dell has the option to simply match any competing bids. This has hardly been settled, which you'd see if you RTFA.

Re:What the summary doesn't say:

[Lucas123]

Exactly. Nothing's changed from the numerous previous leap-frog bidding between HP and Dell for 3Par. Perhaps they should have people familiar with acquisition writing about them at PC Magazine.

Re:What the summary doesn't say:

[BBTaeKwonDo]

Why the dig on PC Magazine? TFA headline is "Sans Dell Match, HP Snaps Up 3PAR for $2 Billion". Sans is French for "without". TFA text continues with "...Dell still maintains the right to match HP's offer if it so chooses..." . So PC Magazine looks spot-on to me.

The fault lies with the Slashdot submitter, who submitted a bad summary to a 2-day-old article, and with Soulskill who accepted the misleading submission, and with you, Lucas123, for not understanding either TFA or the GP's point that TFA was correct.

Re:What the summary doesn't say:

[Lucas123]

It's a lame story either way. The dig against PC Magazine is for writing something like it was news. There have been six bids for 3Par. What's different about this one? Nothing. It's simply the largest so far. So the headline, while not misleading, gives the reader the expectation that something different than past bids has occurred. It's the same as if when HP bid $1.6 billion last week, PC Magazine had written "Sans Dell bid, HP Snaps Up 3Par." Then when Dell submitted a counter offer writing, "Sans HP Bid, Dell Snaps Up 3Par."

Re:Why?

[INeededALogin]

I usually fold well before I'm in for 2 billion.

Re:Why?

[TamCaP]

I was thinking the same thing. I have recently finished Graham's book "The Intelligent Investor", and buying a company for $2bn that has not even once generated any profit is like straight out of the chapter "what to watch out for". A very speculative move, especially by a company without a CEO. Not to mention that bidding is not yet completely over, right?

Re:Why?

[funkatron]

They paid too much and were in a gambler's frame of mind.

Gambling addict's frame of mind. This kind of bidding war is really not the way to win at gambling.

Re:HP : Offshore, now coming to 3PAR

[vlm]

Expect anything that is run in the US or the First World to be offshored. Until HP goes back to the old "HP Way", of course.

They spun the "old HP" into Agilent in an IPO like 11 years ago. It's not coming back.

As opposed to if Dell bought them? I'm thinking it doesn't matter which one purchases it, everyone may as well pack their desks.

Could it be true that regardless of which company bought 3PAR, the same folks in India would get all the jobs?

Re:Why?

[vlm]

So obviously it isn't about the money, it's about the technology

Sometimes mergers happen to eliminate the competition. If you axe a $200M competitor, you can probably increase your revenues more than $200M because less competition means higher prices for everyone... Sure they're not going to ten-tuple, but its not going to take $2B/$200M = 10 years to pay for itself. Maybe, like 5 to 7 years?

Also, sometimes a merger means patents etc that a cheapy competitor couldn't afford to enforce, can now be cashed in.

Check the bid history

[Intron]

One could even say HP sniped the auction at the last minute

Bidder........Bid amount........Bid Time
  HP..........$2,000,000,000....Aug-08-10 11:59:59 PDT
  Dell........$39.95............Aug-08-10 10:37:14 PDT
  HP..........$34.95............Aug-08-10 10:18:22 PDT
  Dell........$24.95............Aug-08-10 9:45:12 PDT
  HP..........$19.95............Aug-08-10 7:06:23 PDT

Re:Why?

[phantomfive]

That's a good point, and in some cases it is true, but I'm not so sure it is here. There are a lot of players in the SAN market, so that $200 Million isn't going all to HP or Dell. It's going to be spread out to a lot of different companies.

Also, I'm sure you realize this, but it's important to distinguish between revenue and profit. Yes $2B/$200M = 10 years, but they are also spending around $201M every year, so in the end, unless they improve the efficiency of the company, they will have made negative $10M at the end of 10 years. Not a good return on investment.

Re:Another News Item From Last Week

[vlueboy]

Slashdot. is now Slashdot: News For Nerds Or Stuff You Can Read From CNN.

No problem. All newspapers repost the same news from Reuters, AP and EFE at about the same time, and many users complain when the one they subscribe to "leaves them in the dark" on grounds of bothersome redundancy for any news, and might leave to a more "all-encompassing," redundant-ish source. Slashdot is doing us a services, since we don't all read your same other sites and few IT admins ever block slashdot.

Wasn't slashdot a site meant to TALK about techish news with tech people? Our tech subscriber base is broader and better informed than you'll find on random non-specialized sites. We can post hacks, opinion on the recent wikileak and pr0n related stuff freely here; because it would otherwise leave broadcast a trail through your Facebook account on CNN. Hey, you just posted Anonymously! try THAT on CNN and any chan-free board these days! :)

eBay 101

[leromarinvit]

Someone needs to teach HP some basic eBay skills. A bidding war doesn't make sense if you're going to snipe anyway. The point of sniping is not letting anybody know beforehand that you're interested in the item!

Re:Why?

[bmwEnthusiast]

Perhaps there is a patent-folio that we are un-aware of that can crush all the little san mfg's. Just a thought...

Re:Why?

[shmlco]

3Par has technology and patents on "light provisioning" systems, that enables disk space to be allocated only when applications need capacity, greatly reducing IT management costs. Think of it as storage on a just-enough and just-in-time basis.

But basically it's because ex-CEO Hurd killed HP's R&D budget. With no R&D, HP is attempting to buy its way into the next big thing.

Hurd deserved to go. Killing off R&D to the point where you have to spend billions buying your way back into the game smacks of a certain lack of foresight and intelligence, does it not?

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/29/behind-the-bidding-war-the-real-reasons-why-hp-and-dell-are-so-desperate-for-3par/?