Dive Brief:
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced Tuesday plans to purchase Nimble Storage, a predictive all-flash and hybrid-flash storage solutions creator.
- HPE will pay $12.50 per share in cash, bringing the purchase price to approximately $1 billion.
- As HPE notes, the acquisitions of Nimble brings in a complementary solution to fit in its storage portfolio, at a time where flash storage is an increasingly lucrative market. IDC recently estimated the market for flash storage will grow to nearly $20 billion by 2020.
Dive Insight:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Q1 revenues were down 10%, and storage was among the casualties. The Nimble purchase may be an attempt to right the ship. The deal will also allow HPE to deliver more types of storage for a variety of customers. Businesses have shown growing interest in flash storage lately, despite it often being a pricey option.
The Nimble buys also gives HPE a slight edge against long-time rival EMC in the storage space. HPE could be gearing up for a showdown now that Dell and EMC have combined forces.
HPE is working to improve its capabilities in helping enterprises implement hybrid IT solutions. According to the 2017 State of the Cloud survey released by RightScale last month, hybrid and multi-cloud adoption continues to grow in the enterprise, with some companies reporting using an average of eight clouds.
Nimble recently announced a new cloud storage service designed to help enterprises use multi-cloud environments and avoid cloud vendor lock-in. The new offering, Nimble Cloud Volumes, will allow companies to jump effortlessly between cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
