HP bangs on glass as 3PAR marches to the altar
Shane Robison shouts 'NOOOOOOOOO'
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If 3PAR decides the HP re-bid is a superior offer it is going to give Dell three days to come up with a better acquisition offer or be jilted.
Dell made an agreed $18/share offer for 3PAR on August 16, after HP refused to raise its first bid on August 1. 3PAR and Dell were then set to walk to the altar with an agreed merger, as it is called in their filings, until HP, re-energised like the graduate Benjamin in that movie, suddenly re-appears and shouts down from the balcony at the back of the church to Elaine (David Scott of 3PAR) with a better offer, and Mrs. Robinson (Dell) says: "It's too late."
Only … it's not. 3PAR and its financial advisor, Qatalyst, run by the canny Frank Quattrone, have determined that the upgraded HP bid may well be a superior offer, as referenced in the Dell-3PAR merger documents, and will "engage in discussions and negotiations with HP regarding its unsolicited acquisition proposal … promptly," to determine if it actually is superior.
It's noteworthy that Shane Robison, HP's chief strategy and technology officer, has sent 3PAR "a proposed merger agreement between HP and 3PAR, which was substantially the same as the merger agreement between 3PAR and Dell except that it did not contain any termination or other break-up fee provisions."
In other words it's probably now down to money alone and 3PAR is saying to Dell that it has to beat HP's offer to progress it's bid; piss or get off the pot effectively.
For now 3PAR will continue recommending that its shareholders accept the Dell offer, but is, subject to it determining that the renewed HP offer is actually superior, going to point the HP gun at Dell's head, giving it "three business days to negotiate an amendment to its Merger Agreement with 3PAR," once 3PAR says the HP bid is kosher.
If Dell comes back with a superior offer then 3PAR will return to the altar. If not, and the HP bid is finally determined to be a superior offer, then David Scott will take his company into the arms of that currently headless behemoth. Over to you Mrs. Robinson.
According to Bloomberg Dell is preparing to raise its bid.
Memo to David Scott: HP happens to need a new CEO by the way - only joking. ®
COMMENTS
They're racks of disks.
HP and Dell have issues. Racks of spinning disks are not how we're solving the IOP/s issues we have for server consolidation and VDI now, and they're not going to be the answer to this problem at any future time. That day is done. Racks of disks are expensive. They're hot. They burn a lot of power. To be honest, the only way racks of disks make sense is if you consider each drive's RAM cache to be the only storage you're using and at that cost you may as well use Flash backed RAMDisk.
It's time to talk about spinning disk as "near line" storage. It's the new tape. Maybe it's fine for files and backups and archiving but for modern storage to consolidated servers we need more grunt. Frankly near-line storage to back a file server is better done in other ways.
Texas Memory Systems can double the best SAN 3Par can offer in a multi-rack solution (T800) (250K IOPS) as a 3 RU module that burns 450 watts. Neither one is cheap, but the TMS is far cheaper and offers much lower latency.
The nearline capacity is nice, but for innovative storage today we need high-density SSD and this ain't it. HP has other answers for backing filestores that scale nearly infinitely with performance and speed in their recent LeftHand acquisition among others. HP doesn't need 3PAR.
The only way this makes sense is in the case of a billion-dollar game of "keep-away", where HP's goal for buying the thing is to kill it to keep Dell from having it. That's puzzling because HP doesn't usually work that way, and even if they did Dell's just going to scratch 3PAR and move to the next small storage vendor down their list.
It just doesn't add up. Something is wrong here. This looks like an ego battle.
Both bids seem high; now it's a pissing match
Given the revenue 3PAR earn, I'm having trouble understanding the bids unless it's a convenient place for a proxy war at stockholder expense (or reward, if you own 3PAR).
And I love the reg, but who edited this article? "3PAR and Dell were then set to walk to the alter ..."
"... 3PAR is saying to Dell that it has to beat HP's offer to progress it's bid..."
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