Mega-Roundup: The Battle for 3PAR

Dell Said to Prepare Sweetened 3Par Bid - From Bloomberg: "Dell Inc. is readying a sweetened offer for data-storage provider 3Par Inc. after its earlier bid was bested by a $1.6 billion proposal by Hewlett-Packard Co., according to a person familiar with the matter."

Everyone Loves 3Par – Here’s Why! - From – Stephen Foskett at Pack Rat: "The 3Par acquisition is a slam dunk at under $2 billion. The company has great enterprise-grade SAN technology and a proven ability to sell into high-end accounts but lacked the revenue to go it alone."

HP Counters Dell for 3PAR - Steve Duplessie from Enterprise Strategy Group: "HP believes (accurately) that 3PAR’s growth or lack thereof is due to their own scale issues, similar to what it saw in 3Com. The 3Com deal is zooming ahead of plan due to exactly that–HP has a damn big sales and service company that is putting 3Com stuff into many more places than 3Com could do alone. It feels the same deal with 3PAR."

Patience May Pay Off For 3Par’s Venture Investors - From the Journal: "Nearly three years after 3PAR's IPO, Mayfield Fund, Menlo Ventures and Worldview Technology Partners still own significant chunks of 3Par stock, and that patience may pay off mightily – thanks to the bidding war between Dell and Hewlett-Packard."

HP'-Dell Bidding War Underscores Demand for Storage - From Ashlee Vance at the NYT: "Data storage used to be one of the more mundane corners of the technology industry. Now it is where an increasing number of tech companies - and Wall Street - want to be."

Echoes of Data Domain? - From eWeek's Storage Station: "The budding bidding war between IT hardware/software powers Dell and Hewlett-Packard for the hand of 3PAR will be interesting to watch. If it's anything resembling EMC versus NetApp for Data Domain a year ago - in which EMC shelled out $2.3 billion for the deduplication master - it will certainly make for scintillating news coverage."

How the Battle for 3PAR Could Escalate - The New York Times: "The bidding for 3PAR has at first glance become very expensive, very quickly. But this battle has a way to go. Hewlett-Packard and Dell may not be alone in the the fray for the last high-end data storage provider on the market."

There's something about 3PAR - From 3PAR's Marc Farley: "Quite suddenly, 3PAR is a very hot company. To a lot of people, especially those who are unfamiliar with the storage industry, one of the obvious questions is 'Who are these people and where did they come from?'"