HP admits failure to justify buying 3Par

BUYER'S REMORSE is a terrible thing but it seems that HP was so keen to justify buying 3Par that it trashed itself in the process.

A bidding war between HP and Dell left HP paying $2.4 billion for 3Par. Questions were raised as to whether HP had overpaid and in a bid to explain why a bidding war broke out and why 3Par is important to HP, its top brass laid on a two hour demonstration of worth. It seemed that HP would go to any lengths, even demeaning its own storage technology to justify spending so much.

HP EVP and general manager Dave Donatelli proclaimed that 3Par provides the "storage product for the next decade" before saying that HP's own efforts in the storage market gained it just 11 per cent market share, which apparently put it third place. That was not good enough, said Donatelli, and the purchase of 3Par was the best way for HP to increase market share.

Following that surprising denunciation of HP's own efforts in the storage market, Donatelli showed how the firm's current offerings, including its Eva and Lefthand servers will make way for 3Par kit. [Correction] 3Par will muscle in on some parts of the market where HP already has products, for instance against Eva, while in what HP terms the 'Service Provider / Cloud' market, 3Par will have the run of the show.

HP later confirmed to The INQUIRER that it will continue to support and update its current line of storage servers and that 3Par will simply mean that it can now address new markets, which should lead to greater market share.

It seems a shame that HP had to essentially deprecate its own storage technology in order to justify splashing out for 3Par. When 3Par spoke to The INQUIRER, it was clear that the firm's aggressive focus on software design and its proprietary ASIC technology easily sell themselves, not requiring HP to undersell itself by depreciating its own technical efforts.

When asked why a bidding war broke out over 3Par, the former CEO of 3Par who is now at HP's Storageworks division, Dave Scott said that "there is no alternative for cloud storage [to 3Par]". That is perhaps a debatable statement, though 3Par does pride itself on creating hardware and software solely for external storage, not what it claims are "hybrid solutions" from the likes of Oracle.

After a two hour snoozefest, the audience was none the wiser as to whether HP paid over the odds for 3Par. Perhaps it should reconsider the way that it tries to promote 3Par, because lowering the bar for 3Par is doing the firm a great disservice. µ