HPE strengthens its arm in Hybrid IT with Nimble

Meg Whitman
President and CEO
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
 

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has taken the next move to strengthen its comprehensive portfolio and go along with the industry, in spanning the cloud to the data center to workplace applications. The acquisition of Nimble for $1.9 billion expands HPE's leadership position in the high-growth flash storage market that will create a comprehensive, leading-edge storage portfolio by bringing together highly complementary solutions to help customers around the world to make IT more efficient, productive and secure.

There is no doubt that business leaders are looking to optimise and grow their businesses, and cloud can give them the benefit of reduced costs and providing better customer experience.

Flash storage is a fast-growing market and an increasingly important element of today's hybrid IT environment. The overall flash market was estimated to be approximately $15 billion in 2016 and is expected to be nearly $20 billion by 2020, with the all-flash segment growing at a nearly 17 percent compound annual growth rate. Nimble's predictive flash offerings for the entry to midrange segments are complementary to HPE's scalable midrange to high-end 3PAR solutions and affordable MSA products. This deal will enable HPE to deliver a full range of superior flash storage solutions for customers across every segment.
“This is the fourth acquisition of HPE this year. The deal comes even as HPE's recently completed $650 million acquisition of hyper-converged provider SimpliVity, Cloud Cruiser (Infrastructure analytics), Niara (Security analytics vendor) and now Nimble Storage's portfolio which complements and strengthens the 3PAR products in the high-growth flash storage market will help us deliver the vision of making Hybrid IT simple for our customers," said Meg Whitman, President and CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Key benefits to the customers with combined HPE and Nimble –
•    The ability to seamlessly move data and replicate across hybrid flash and all-flash storage to meet unpredictable IT demands
•    Integrated data protection with application aware snapshots, encryption, replication and integration with leading independent software vendors
•    Effortless management of storage volumes along with data compaction to reduce capacity costs
•    Predictive support automation to anticipate and prevent most problems and solve remaining issues in a matter of minutes
•    Quality of service controls and full stack analytics to ensure predictable performance in hybrid IT deployments
•    Increased dedicated sales specialist support
•    A future-proofed technology platform with a rich roadmap to support next-generation storage

There are numerous benefits to using a hybrid cloud instead of a more singular approach, whether that is using only a public cloud or a private cloud. With an objective to make it full proof not only needs the performance of flash storage but it also looks for predictive intelligence to optimize their infrastructure. With Nimble Storage (a vendor of all-flash and hybrid flash storage products) and 3PAR, HPE can now deliver on those storage needs and provide more effective on-premises control and performance, at public cloud economics. With this HPE is fast emerging as a major disruptive force in the infrastructure market.
HPE has chosen the best option with Nimble for enhancing its storage portfolio independently.

Nimble Storage offers converged flash arrays with predictive software for provisioning to speed up storage performance. Nimble's strong application performance in its entry to midrange flash storage solutions is backed by an intelligent, predictive analytics engine that delivers a simplified customer experience. This unique analytics platform goes beyond storage to analyze performance issues across the full data path, from apps to the array, and resolves most issues before they occur. In addition, Nimble has recently introduced multicloud storage services that combine the best of on-premises and public cloud storage capabilities for Hybrid IT deployments.

As on today, over 10,000 enterprises are using Nimble Storage because its Predictive Cloud Platform is reliably fast, radically simple, and cloud ready. 
“With this we will be the Industry leader in fast growing flash-storage market," said Suresh Vasudevan, CEO at Nimble Storage. "This acquisition validates our technology leadership in flash and in the use of cloud-based predictive analytics. We are confident that by combining Nimble Storage's technology leadership with HPE's global distribution strength, strong brand and enterprise relationships, we are creating expansion opportunities for the combined company."

In the storage space, this is just as big as Aruba being acquired by HPE. Industry expert visualizes Nimble acquisition as another HPE infrastructure game-changer. There is no doubt that Nimble has a great product - this is going to really help drive sales growth for HPE in the all-flash data center market and this tightens HPE's hold as a one top data center shop. It provides HPE with new hot technology to drive growth.