HPE’s has offered to buy Nimble Storage for $1.09B.
The StorageMojo take
This is a good move for both companies. HPE has the enterprise footprint that Nimble was spending big to build, and Nimble has an advanced and forward looking storage platform that will bring new ideas into HPE’s enterprise storage group, as well as a cost-effective line of products that don’t have much overlap with existing products.
I don’t expect to see the kind of cultural integration issues that Dell is facing with its EMC acquisition either. HPE may be old-line, but it is old-line Silicon Valley – not brash south Boston – and Nimble’s SV culture is a much better fit.
Meg Whitman is stealing a page from Joe Tucci’s playbook: becoming a technology publisher, rather than building everything from scratch internally. That’s what EMC did with Isilon, VMware, DSSD, Data Domain and others. While the strategy has its costs – disparate product lines mean added engineering and support costs – it leverages costly enterprise footprint.
NetApp’s failure to launch an internally developed flash array is a great example of why building from scratch internally is problematic. Rather than a clean sheet design, internal folks can pile on requirements that may make sense as a line extension, but no sense at all from a customer perspective.
I worked with Nimble in their early days – emerging technologies, products and companies are my focus – and they combined a strong architecture with an experienced team that led to – mostly – excellent execution. StorageMojo congratulates Nimble on a great run.
Courteous comments welcome, of course.
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