Hewlett Packard Enterprise has written a $1 billion in cash cheque to buy Nimble Storage which makes predictive all-flash and hybrid-flash storage systems.
HPE claims it will mean that it can offer a full range of flash storage systems for different customer bands. HPE’s hopes the move will see of rivals from Dell EMC, NetApp and Pure Storage.
IDC reckons the flash storage market topped reached $15 billion in 2016, and will grow to almost $20 billion by 2020 with nearly 17 percent compound annual growth rate.
Nimble’s flash systems are aimed at SMEs and HPE said the acquisition is complementary to its midrange to high-end 3PAR flash storage systems and its affordable MSA products.
Meg Whitman, HPE president and CEO, in a statement that Nimble Storage’s portfolio complements and strengthens HPE’s 3PAR products in the high-growth flash storage market and will help it deliver on its vision of making Hybrid IT simple for our customers.
“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.”
HPE wants Nimble’s InfoSight Predictive Analytics platform to be used across its storage products portfolio. That technology helps IT managers detect and resolve IT infrastructure issues, reducing the amount of time spent on support activities.
Combining the HPE and Nimble product portfolios would allow customers to more easily move and replicate data across hybrid flash and all-flash storage to meet IT demands, more easily manage storage volumes and data compaction to reduce capacity costs, and integrate data protection capabilities with data encryption, replication and integration capabilities provided by third-party applications, Whiteman said.
Antonio Neri, executive vice president and general manager of HPE’s Enterprise Group wrote in the company’s bog that Nimble’s entry to midrange predictive flash storage solutions, coupled with InfoSight, its leading predictive analytics technology, will strengthen HPE’s flash storage portfolio by expanding market reach and enabling a transformed, analytics-based customer experience.
