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. HPE plans to incorporate Nimble’s InfoSight Predictive Analytics platform across its storage portfolio, which will enable a stronger, simplified support experience for HPE customers. For example, InfoSight automatically detects 90% of all issues within a customer’s infrastructure, and resolves over 85% of them. According to the HPE, this will dramatically reduce the amount of time and effort a customer’s IT team spends on support activities.
In a blog, Suresh Vasudevan, CEO, Nimble Storage said, “Through numerous discussions with HPE’s leadership, it became clear that HPE is a great partner. We believe that the combination of Nimble Storage and HPE creates an industry leader in the fast growing flash storage market, with predictive analytics providing an unmatched operational and support experience.”
By bringing together its product portfolios and leveraging HPE’s expansive go-to-market capability, partner ecosystem, and leading server platform, HPE and Nimble are aiming to accelerate the financial performance of the combined business. Nimble also stated that the acquisition would lead to the implementation of a roadmap that goes beyond flash arrays. It also claimed that it will continue to support its customers using InfoSight Predictive Analytics and Nimble Cloud Volumes among others.
“Over 10,000 enterprises are using Nimble Storage because our Predictive Cloud Platform is reliably fast, radically simple, and cloud ready. 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,” added Vasudevan.
Expected to close in April this year, the terms of the agreement, a subsidiary of HPE will commence a tender offer to purchase any and all of the outstanding shares of Nimble common stock for $12.50 per share in cash. Nimble stockholders representing approximately 21% of Nimble’s outstanding shares have entered into a Tender and Support Agreement committing them to tender their shares into the tender offer.
“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.”
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.
“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, 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.”
