The auction [not] has ended: HP might acquire 3PAR for $2 bn – Updated

Updated at bottom of post. The auction, apparently, has not ended.

After tossing bids back and forth last week between HP and Dell, a price of $2 billion has finally been reached in the 3PAR acquisition. That is, translated, $30 per share of the California-based storage company.

The deal is, no doubt, due to both HP and Dell seeing a sharp decline in their PC sales while sales in the cloud-based systems market continue to rise. PC Magazine tells the story that the $2 billion valuation of 3PAR by HP is “the highest premium offered in such a bidding situation among more than 19 thousand different deals” that have been tracked by Bloomberg over time.

With 2 billion dollars of your shareholder’s money riding on the line, the deal had best take off in a huge way for HP. An continually-growing market of cloud-based resources, however, softens the potential shocking blow of the acquisition.

Edit: In an interesting twist, we were notified via Twitter from a source claiming that Dell is a “client” of his, and telling us that we should dig further into this. Upon digging, here’s what we’ve found.

• 3PAR intends to take the HP deal, if Dell does not counter-offer with a better one.
• At present, 3PAR still has a merger agreement in place with Dell, so it is required to push that agreement to its shareholders.
• 3PAR intends to terminate the agreement “three business days” after this past Friday. The best guess, then, is that the agreement should terminate on Wednesday, barring a counter-offer from Dell.

Coincidentally, we’ve also learned that you shouldn’t always believe what you read, because some sources make some pretty ballsy statements based on conjecture.