Dell Ups 3Par Bid, Cools Takeover Heat

NEW YORK,(TheStreet) - Dell(DELL) stepped up its bid for 3Par(PAR) Thursday with a price a mere 30 cents a share over Hewlett-Packard's(HPQ) offer, signaling that a rich bidding war may not be in store.

Dell says 3Par has accepted a revised takeover offer of $24.30 per share, a mere $20 million more than Hewlett-Packard's bid of $24 per share. The new offer is significantly higher than Dell's original $18 a share proposal earlier this month.

Shares of storage specialist 3Par fell 1% to $26.60. Earlier this week, in the wake of the HP offer, 3Par shares soared to $27.49 or nearly 50% in anticipation of a much bigger offer from Dell.

HP and Dell are interested in 3Par's Web-based or cloud storage service as a way to fill in gaps in their largely hardware based network storage offerings.

The merger interest in the storage sector could ignite larger deals like a move by Cisco(CSCO) to acquire data networking partner EMC(EMC).

--Written by Scott Moritz in New York.

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