News

HPE Bags Nimble For A Whopping $1bn

IT
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has acquired Nimble Storage, the San Jose, Calif.-based provider of predictive all-flash and hybrid-flash storage solutions. HPE will pay a net cash purchase price of $1.0 billion. In addition to the purchase price, HPE will assume or pay out Nimble’s unvested equity awards, with a value of approximately $200 million at closing.

Flash storage is a fast-growing market and an increasingly important element of today’s hybrid IT environment. The overall flash market was estimated to be approximately $15 billion in 2016 and is expected to be nearly $20 billion by 2020, with the all-flash segment growing at a nearly 17 percent compound annual growth rate.

Nimble’s predictive flash offerings for the entry to midrange segments are complementary to HPE’s scalable midrange to high-end 3PAR solutions and affordable MSA products. This deal will enable HPE to deliver a full range of superior flash storage solutions for customers across every segment.

HPE plans to incorporate Nimble’s InfoSight Predictive Analytics platform across its storage portfolio. InfoSight automatically detects 90 percent of all issues within a customer’s infrastructure, and resolves over 85 percent of them. This dramatically reduces the amount of time and effort a customer’s IT team spends on support activities.

“Nimble Storage’s portfolio complements and strengthens our current 3PAR products in the high-growth flash storage market and will help us deliver on our vision of making Hybrid IT simple for our customers,” said Meg Whitman, President and CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “And, this acquisition is exactly aligned with the strategy and capital allocation approach we’ve laid out. We remain focused on high-growth and higher-margin segments of the market.”

“Customers deploying hybrid IT not only need the performance of flash storage but are looking for predictive intelligence to optimize their infrastructure,” said Antonio Neri, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise Group, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “With Nimble Storage and 3PAR, we can now deliver on those storage needs and provide more effective on-premises control and performance, at public cloud economics.”

“Over 10,000 enterprises are using Nimble Storage because our Predictive Cloud Platform is reliably fast, radically simple, and cloud ready,” said Suresh Vasudevan, CEO at Nimble Storage. “This acquisition validates our technology leadership in flash and in the use of cloud-based predictive analytics. We’re confident that by combining Nimble Storage’s technology leadership with HPE’s global distribution strength, strong brand, and enterprise relationships, we’re creating expansion opportunities for the combined company.”

The tender offer and merger and closing of the transaction are expected to be completed in April.