HP To Buy 3PAR For $2.35 Bln. After Dell Pulls Out

(RTTNews) - Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ: News ) Thursday entered into a definitive agreement to buy data storage firm 3PAR Inc. (PAR: News ) through a cash tender offer of $33 per share in cash, or an enterprise value of $2.35 billion. 3PAR said its board has determined that HP's revised offer constitutes a superior proposal to the bid from Dell Inc. (DELL: News ). Earlier in the day, Dell decided to opt out of the race for 3PAR. The deal has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies.

3PAR stock, which has been on an upward trend since mid-August with a significant increase in trading volume, rose to a new high this morning, and closed at $32.88, up 2.49%.

HP's cash tender offer commenced on August 27 and is scheduled to expire on September 24, subject to customary tender offer conditions being satisfied. The final closing of the acquisition is expected to occur by the end of the calendar year.

Earlier today Hewlett-Packard raised its offer to acquire 3PAR to $33 per share from $30 per share, making the bid superior once again to its peer Dell. The HP offer marked an end to the intense battle, fought with the aim of gaining an edge in the lucrative and growing market for high-end data centers.

The revised offer from HP came after Dell raised its bid to $32 per share from $27 per share, following 3PAR's earlier notification of its intention to terminate the merger agreement with Dell. Dell said it will not increase its most recent offer and noted it has ended discussions regarding the acquisition. 3PAR also said that it has terminated its merger agreement with Dell and paid the $72 million break-up fee required to be paid to Dell as a condition to terminating the merger agreement.

3PAR is a provider of utility storage, a category of highly virtualized, dynamically tiered, multi-tenant storage arrays built for public and private cloud computing.

The company's virtualized storage platform was built from the ground up to be agile and efficient and to eliminate the limitations of traditional storage arrays for utility infrastructures. As a pioneer of thin provisioning and other storage virtualization technologies, the company designs its products to reduce power consumption to help companies meet their green computing initiatives and to cut storage total cost of ownership.

The combination of 3PAR's utility storage products with its storage solutions is expected strengthen HP's unparalleled storage, server and networking portfolio. The acquisition will accelerate HP's highly successful Converged Infrastructure strategy, driving growth in the fast-growing virtual data center and cloud computing markets.

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