HPE snaps up SimpliVity in a $650M deal

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced a definitive agreement to acquire SimpliVity, a provider of software-defined, hyperconverged infrastructure, for $650 million in cash. With this acquisition, HPE aims to bring together its infrastructure, automation and cloud management software with SimpliVity’s software-defined data management platform to deliver a “built-for-enterprise” hyperconverged offering.

“This transaction expands HPE’s software-defined capability and fits squarely within our strategy to make Hybrid IT simple for customers. 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” said Meg Whitman, President and CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Founded in 2009, SimpliVity is a privately held firm headquartered in Westborough, MA. With its hyperconverged infrastructure, it aims to meet the needs of enterprise customers who require on-premises technology infrastructure with enterprise-class performance, data protection, and resiliency, at cloud economics. The company explains that a hyperconverged system integrates compute, storage and networking into a pre-configured system, managed by a user-friendly software platform that doesn’t require extensive IT staff for set up and management. The combined HPE and SimpliVity portfolio is aimed at offering a rich set of enterprise data services across hyperconverged, 3PAR storage, composable infrastructure and multi-cloud offerings. “Over the past 8 years we’ve been on an incredible journey and joining HPE is the logical next step for SimpliVity,” said Doron Kempel, Chairman and CEO, SimpliVity.

“HPE’s broad sales reach, extensive partner channel, complementary technology and commitment to innovation will accelerate SimpliVity’s journey and significantly strengthen our ability to deliver the best-in-class hybrid IT solutions our customers are looking for,” Kempel added.

How will customers benefit?

The du0 claims to provide the following benebits to customers by adding SimpliVity’s technology to HPE’s hyperconverged portfolio:

• Built-in enterprise data protection and resiliency that simplifies backup and enables customers to more quickly restore operations.
• Enterprise storage utilization and virtual machine (VM) efficiency that helps customers control cost and performance.
• Always-on compression and de-duplication that guarantees 90 percent capacity savings across storage and backup.
• Policy-based VM-centric management that simplifies operations and enables data mobility, making development teams and end-users more productive.

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. Looking forward, HPE says that its customers can expect to see their hyperconverged experience continue to improve with new innovations like “workspace” controls, which provide business leaders and developers with simple self-service portals to compose virtualized and containerized resources, and accelerate application development and deployment. Additionally, HPE has revealed plans to provide enhanced business insight, including predictive analytics, which will give IT managers the tools they need to increase resource utilization and proactively respond to needs for new resources.