Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ) is in talks with SimpliVity, a US based IT infrastructure startup, for the purpose of acquiring it. Social, mobile, cloud and big data trends are the driving forces behind the ongoing view of HP CEO Meg Whitman on a ‘new style of IT’ and the acquisition is said to be closely aligned with this view of the CEO. Nothing has been said about the issue by HP and SimpliVity.
More about SimpliVity
Omnicube is the flagship product for which SimpliVity is popularly known. It is a federated and converged infrastructure platform that combines compute, storage, networking, backup, WAN optimization, and cloud integration. As reported by CRN, a “building block” approach of converged infrastructure with proprietary software running on top will be brought to HP with the help and support of SimpliVity. Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ) is confident that its backup and product portfolio will get a boost with SimpliVity, as informed to CRN by HP partners.
“Some of the things SimpliVity is doing around compression and deduplication are very special,” Jed Ayres, chief marketing officer at MCPc, a Cleveland-based HP partner, said. “If HP can build that into some of the things they’re doing with 3PAR, that could give them a significant advantage.”
Since 2009, the year in which it was founded, $ 101.5 million has been raised by SimpliVity. According to Architecting IT, this includes a $58 million in C-round last November, and $18 million and $25 million in A and B rounds respectively. Investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Swisscom Ventures, Accel Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Charles River Ventures, and DFJ Growth, according to CrunchBase.
More weapons to compete against Cisco
It is being claimed by SimpliVity and rival Nutanix that in comparison with products like Vblocks and FlexPods, a less expensive approach to data center infrastructure is hyper-converged. SimpliVity’s global sales’ vice president, Mitch Breen, in an interview last week, said that the startup is, also, positioned as an alternative to VCE Vblocks.
According to Breen, in comparison with Vblocks, SimpliVity Omnicubes are a much easier building block for customers to consume. This is so because they run on commodity hardware, which makes simply adding more servers easier for customers as they grow.
VMware’s relationship with Cisco Systems, Inc.(NASDAQ:CSCO), the rival of Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ), is growing increasingly acrimonious and VMware has close ties with SimpliVity. Competing against Cisco will become more effective for HP once it brings SimpliVity into the fold.
