Long-time readers already know I’m a long-time fan of SimpliVity (in fact, they’re one place I had contacted as part of my current job search). I’d been rooting for them to make it to the IPO stage.
Unfortunately, the market hasn’t been kind to recent tech IPOs and it appears that SimpliVity’s investors have decided not to take the risks associated with waiting for the market to turn around.
According to the HPE press release, this acquisition will allow HPE to combine their “best-in-class infrastructure, automation, and cloud management software” with SimpliVity’s “industry-leading software-defined data management platform”. They say this combination will allow them to deliver the “industry’s only ‘built-for-enterprise’ hyperconverged offering”. (Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple vendors with hyperconverged solutions who might take exception to HPE’s use of the word “only”…)
Here are my thoughts on the acquisition and what the future of SimpliVity might look like, in no particular order.
If HPE can manage to incorporate the OmniStack software with its data deduplication and snapshot/restore capabilities, this will turn out to be a big plus for them. I’m not optimistic though.
