Dell trumps HP with winning 3Par bid

3Par has accepted Dell's revised acquisition bid, the California-based storage specialists announced on Thursday.

The winning bid, which will see Dell pay $1.6bn (£1.03bn) for all common 3Par stock, or $24.30 per share, was made on 23 August. It still needs approval from 3Par's stockholders before 20 September, unless the companies involved agree to extend this period. 3Par's board of directors has unanimously recommended that stockholders accept the deal, which values each share at more than double the price it was before any bids were made for the company.

"Dell's desire for 3Par is driven in part by its belief that 3Par, with its architecturally superior utility storage solution, is important to Dell's customers and will enhance its position in cloud-based storage applications," a 3Par spokesperson said in a statement. "3Par's multi-tenant, clustered architecture enables IT organisations to deliver software and hardware as a service, offering an agile, efficient storage infrastructure platform optimised for highly-virtualised datacentres and cloud computing."

Dell made an offer of $1.15bn for 3Par on 16 August, which was accepted at the time. However, the deal quickly looked in jeopardy as HP counter-offered $1.6bn for the virtualisation-friendly storage company, in a bid to fold the company into part of its converged infrastructure portfolio and bolster its cloud strategy.

On Tuesday, 3Par responded to the HP counter-bid by telling Dell that it had three days to submit another offer or 3Par would begin merger negotiations with HP.