HP Fires Back, Offers $1.8 Billion for 3PAR

Not to be outbid by rival Dell, HP has once again raised its acquisition offer for 3PAR, this time to $27.00 per share in cash, or an enterprise value of $1.8 billion.

HP’s (NYSE: HPQ) new proposal is 11 percent higher than this morning’s $24.30 per share, $1.6 billion offer from Dell (NASDAQ: DELL).

“Our revised proposal offers superior value to 3PAR’s shareholders, while maintaining our disciplined approach to only pursuing acquisitions that we believe will strengthen our portfolio and create long-term value for our shareholders,” Dave Donatelli, HP’s executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking, said in a statement. “Not only is our offer superior to Dell’s proposal, HP remains uniquely positioned to execute on this combination given the number of synergies between the two companies.”

Dell upped its bid for storage vendor 3PAR today, besting HP’s last bid by a slim margin of $0.30 per share in cash.

Dell raised its offer after HP (NYSE: HPQ) sparked a bidding war over 3PAR with a $24.00 per share, $1.6 billion offer of its own earlier this week.

3PAR’s claim to fame is its “utility storage” systems, which are based on a multi-tenant, clustered storage architecture that supports the delivery of software and hardware as a service for virtualized data centers and cloud computing.

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