![The auction [not] has ended: HP might acquire 3PAR for $2 bn – Updated](https://img-cdn.tnwcdn.com/image?fit=1280%2C720&url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn0.tnwcdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F1%2Ffiles%2F2010%2F08%2FHP_JOBS_170299f.jpg&signature=031e2441e81413ec2890c01c3ae36d1c)
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Brad McCarty
A music and tech junkie who calls Nashville home, Brad is the Director TNW Academy. You can follow him on Twitter @BradMcCarty. A music and tech junkie who calls Nashville home, Brad is the Director TNW Academy. You can follow him on Twitter @BradMcCarty.
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.