HP Enterprise is acquiring SimpliVity for $650 million in cash. The deal positions HPE and SimpliVity against Nutanix, Dell-EMC, VMware and Cisco Systems in the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) data center market.
Rumors about HPE acquiring SimpliVity have circulated since November 2016. The $650 million price tag is far lower than the rumored $3.8 billion price tag chatter from last year. The deal follows HPE's decision to sell-off certain software assets in 2016.
"This transaction expands HPE's software-defined capability and fits squarely within our strategy to make Hybrid IT simple for customers," said HPE President and CEO Meg Whitman in a prepared 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."
What is Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) ?
SympliVity is one of the early leaders in the hyperconverged data center market. A hyperconverged offering integrates compute, storage and networking into a pre-configured system. A single IT management platform can typically oversee the entire offering. The global market for hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) will reach $12.8 billion in 2022, up from $804.5 million in 2015, according to Stratistics MRC. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 48.4 percent, the researcher says. SimpliVity competes head-on against Nutanix, which has working relationships with a range of hardware companies -- particularly Lenovo, which launched a formalized data center partner program last week. HPE and SimpliVity announced a product roadmap as part of the deal:- For current HPE customers and partners, the company will continue to offer its existing hyperconverged products, the HC 380 and the HC 250.
- For SimpliVity customers and partners, there will be no immediate change in the product roadmap and HPE will continue to support existing SimpliVity customers and platforms.
- Within 60 days of closing the transaction, HPE intends to offer the SimpliVity Omni Stack software qualified for its ProLiant DL380 servers.
- In the second half of 2017, the company will offer a range of integrated HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged systems based on HPE ProLiant Servers.