Michael Dell: HP Overpaid for 3Par
DAVOS, Switzerland (
) --
Dell
(DELL) - Get Report
CEO Michael Dell believes that rival
Hewlett-Packard
(HPQ) - Get Report
overpaid when it spent
to acquire
3Par
last year.
Speaking in an interview with
at the World Economic Forum, Dell explained why his company exited last summer's
bidding war
with HP over 3Par. ""We showed a good discipline and didn't take an emotional decision," he said. HP paid "way too much" for 3Par, added the CEO, who compared the deal to the
paid for storage firm
Compellent
(CML)
in December.
Michael Dell believes that HP paid too much for storage specialist 3Par. |
Dell also confirmed that his company has more M&A up its sleeve. "We are looking at more acquisition opportunities in software, data centers, cloud computing, storage and virtualization," he said.
There has already been
that
NetApp
(NTAP) - Get Report
could make an attractive target for Dell, although, with a market cap of more than $19 billion, the storage maker would not come cheap.
Other storage companies cited as a
good fit
include publicly traded
CommVault
(CVLT) - Get Report
and
Falconstor
(FALC)
, as well as privately-held
DataDirect
,
BlueArc
and
Xiotech
. Data networking company
Brocade
(BRCD)
has also been
.
Technologies such as virtualization, data center gear and cloud computing
are all expected to be big winners in 2011
, boosted by healthy enterprise IT spending.
Dell admitted that certain companies' valuations have risen dramatically recently, according to
Bloomberg
. "There's a fairly striking disconnect between the valuation of established tech companies and the newly-emerging ones," he said. "The market will figure it out."
Dell shares rose 17 cents, or 1.24%, to $13.90 on Wednesday as the Nasdaq gained 0.09%.
HP declined to provide comment for this story.
--Written by James Rogers in New York.
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