Reinventing HPE: 6 Acquisitions Driving Sales Growth
Buying Season
HPE has been on an acquisition tear in 2017, purchasing four companies including hyper-converged powerhouse SimpliVity and all-flash superstar Nimble Storage.
The company's buying spree started before the company's historic split with HP Inc., when Hewlett-Packard acquired Aruba Networks for $3 billion.
This acquisition charge is focused squarely on leveraging HPE's highly prized partner network. SimpliVity and Nimble Storage, two HPE's most recent additions, are 100 percent channel companies.
"We are moving much faster," said HPE CEO Meg Whitman. "We are not sacrificing due diligence or the vetting of these companies. Because we are smaller and more nimble we can do these things faster."
Here are six acquisitions that are driving sales growth for HPE partners.
Aruba Networks
Date: February 2015
Price: $3 Billion
Key Products: Aruba has a complete line of mobile cloud-first networking products that have become the standard at the intelligent edge. The star is the company's software portfolio, which includes ClearPass security software and the Meridian mobile app platform.
Sales Growth Impact: An acquisition that has become one of the three pillars of HPE, Aruba has maintained solid double-digit sales growth since the HPE acquisition. HPE Chief Sales Officer Peter Ryan calls it a "gift from the gods" for HPE and its partners.
Road Map: Aruba continues to deliver big innovation at every segment of the intelligent edge and Internet of Things market. Look for it to drive its mobile cloud-first approach even further.
SGI
Date: November 2016
Price: $275 Million
Key Products: SGI's high-performance compute portfolio includes servers, storage and software for the most demanding compute environments.
Sales Growth Impact: A crown jewel in an $11 billion high-performance market that is growing at 6 percent to 8 percent.
Road Map: Combining the SGI portfolio with HPE's own high-performance compute products accelerates the development of new solutions in specialized fields including genomics research, life sciences and cybersecurity.
Clou d Cruiser
Date: January 2017
Price: Terms not disclosed
Key Products: The Cloud Cruiser software provides cloud consumption metering and analytics. The software's interactive dashboards with actionable recommendations to control costs were being used by some of the top public cloud providers.
Sales Growth Impact: A hybrid IT game-changer. Cloud Cruiser provides HPE with critical multi-cloud consumption-based budgeting and metering technology that allows partners to assist customers in reining in out-of-control cloud costs.
Road Map: HPE is integrating Cloud Cruiser into its popular Flexible Capacity model, which allows partners to sell private cloud in a public cloud consumption model.
Niara
Date: January 2017
Price: Terms not disclosed
Key Products: Niara with its Analyzer product is a pioneer in the user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) security market.
Sales Growth Impact: A major competitive weapon has been added to HPE Aruba's growing software arsenal aimed at dominating the intelligent edge and IoT market.
Road Map: Aruba is combining the Niara UEBA software with its highly acclaimed ClearPass network security offering to form what the company calls the "industry's most complete visibility and attack detection system."
SimpliVity
Date: February 2017
Price: $650 Million
Key Products: SimpliVity, a hyper-converged pioneer, provides HPE with an enterprise-proven software-defined data management platform.
Sales Growth Impact: The hyper-converged market is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 25 percent to nearly $6 billion by 2020. Look for HPE partners to put pressure on hyper-converged rivals Nutanix and Cisco's Hyperflex.
Road Map: HPE is integrating the acclaimed SimpliVity software-defined storage layer with its OneView management platform, Synergy and 3Par. HPE also is integrating SimpliVity with its ProLiant DL380 servers.
Nimble Storage
Date: April 2017
Price: $1 Billion
Key Products: Nimble's all-flash portfolio is driving huge storage performance gains for customers. The biggest differentiator: Nimble's InfoSight predictive analytics software.
Sales Growth Impact: Entry-level all-flash fills a big void for HPE partners in a fast-growth market. Nimble grew its annual sales by 25 percent to $402 million in the most recent fiscal year.
Road Map: HPE is leveraging the breakthrough InfoSight technology to manage its entire storage portfolio, integrating it with the HPE OneView management platform.