Happy Monday everyone! Pretty big news today, HP decided to but in a $1.6 billion dollar bid in for 3Par, a virtualized storage vendor. This is pretty big news in the fact that Dell had offered $1.3 billion in what looked like a slam-dunk deal. Of course, the board of 3Par has to approve the offer; I find it hard to believe they won’t pick the larger price of the two. However nothing is final as of yet.

This by itself isn’t much of a story (at least from virtualization standpoint), although HP to acquire such a big company during CEO transition is an interesting side note. But what this does do is showcase the building up of the competitive unified cloud space (private and public). First you had Cisco break he mold with their UCS story. Then HP countered with their HP Matrix. Recently EMC announced the vblock (VMware, Cisco, and EMC storage) and Netapp announced a partnership with (Cisco, VMware, and Netapp Storage). In short, Dell was basically left out of the loop.

It wasn’t a surprise that Dell made the offer, they need something to add to their Equallogic line, and their partnership with EMC (reselling CLARiiON boxes) isn’t the strongest at this point. If Dell doesn’t make a move on something fast, I don’t think they will have a unified solution story, which I would think, would put them at a huge disadvantage in the near future. 3Par is a good target, and I doubt Dell will give up without a fight.

Long term there is a lot more questions than answers. I find all the recent acquisitions to be a bit unnerving, as do many of my clients. It is hard to make a large purchase knowing that your potential vendor is an acquisition target.  As well, you don’t want to miss out on the new hot thing, or worse invest in something that is obsolete in 12-18 months. Until the dust settles there could be a lot of projects on hold until people trust that there solutions will be around for a while.