For IT leaders at midmarket companies, hyper-convergence is considered a high priority. Vendors that focus on integrating data center technologies have brought their message to the Midsize Enterprise Summit over the past few years, touting the solution’s ability to reduce IT costs, gain efficiency, and cut management time.
Among the companies that have focused on this technology are Scale Computing, SimpliVity and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which have spoken with IT leaders at MES, the world’s largest gathering of midmarket It leaders. Top executives from those companies have engaged with CIOs to help them understand the promise of hyper-convergence and convince them to invest in their IT products.
That is why HPE’s $650 million cash bid for privately held SimpliVity caught the attention of the midmarket CIO community. In a prepared statement, Meg Whitman, CEO of HPE, said, “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.”
Below is a recap of some recent coverage of the acquisition, with varying perspectives for IT leaders:
- Industry-leading IT channel website CRN.com reported that the deal will increase sales of hyper-converged products in a market estimated to have hit $2.4 billion in 2016 (and growing at 25 percent a year). The deal will pull more IT partners into this market opportunity.
- HPE released full details of the deal (which is expected to close by April) but it could have a more immediate impact on customers looking at offerings from companies such as Nutanix. HPE said that within 60 days of closing the transaction, it intends to offer the SimpliVity Omni Stack software, qualified for its ProLiant DL380 servers.
- InfoStor posted an interesting story for CIOs trying to decipher the move and its impact on their infrastructures. The story quotes Scale Computing CEO Jeff Ready as saying that SimpliVity has a huge reliance on VMware.
- Forbes contributor editor Peter Cohan illuminated the financial details behind the deal, and how SimpliVity’s CEO Doron Kempel had planned to take the company public, but changed course.
