Hewlett Packard Enterprise is opening up its wallet in order to boost the company’s position in the Hybrid IT market.
The company is to build out its portfolio with the acquisition of Nimble Storage, a California-based provider of predictive all-flash and hybrid-flash storage solutions.
The deal will see HPE pay $12.50 per share in cash, which represents a net cash purchase price at closing of $1bn. HPE will also assume or pay out Nimble’s unvested equity awards, with a value of approximately $200 million at closing.
HPE’s acquisition of Nimble is designed to be complimentary to its existing portfolio of flash storage, which is represented by 3PAR.
According to the company, Nimble provides predictive flash offerings for the entry to midrange segments, while 3PAR is for the high-end market.
Meg Whitman, President and CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said: “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.
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“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.” 
HPE already has plans to put Nimble’s products to work, with the company’s InfoSight Predictive Analytics platform due to be incorporated across HPE storage portfolio. The idea behind this is to allow customers to do things like automatically detect 90% of all issues within a customer’s infrastructure and resolve 85% of them, according to the company.
Customers of HPE should hope to see increased ability to move data and replicate across hybrid flash and all-flash storage, along with integrated data protection with application aware snapshots, encryption, replication and integration with other software vendors.
Nimble, which was founded in 2007, is said to have delivered revenue of $402 million in its most fiscal year, up 25% year over year.
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Antonio Neri, EVP and GM of the Enterprise Group, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said: “Customers deploying hybrid IT not only need the performance of flash storage but are looking for predictive intelligence to optimize their infrastructure.
“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.”
Under 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.
