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Technology mergers and acquisitions are on the rise, and any one of them could throw a wrench into your IT operations.
After all, many of the software vendors you rely on for point solutions likely offer cross-platform or multiplatform products, linking into your chosen ERP and its main competitors, for example, or to your preferred hyperscaler, as well as other cloud services and components of your IT estate.
What’s going to happen, then, if that point solution is acquired by another vendor — perhaps not your preferred supplier — and integrated into its stack?
The question is topical: Hyperconverged infrastructure vendor Nutanix, used by many enterprises to unify their private and public clouds, has been the subject of takeover talk ever since Bain Capital invested $750 million in it in August 2020. Rumored buyers have included IBM, Cisco, and Bain itself, and in December 2022 reports named HPE as a potential acquirer of Nutanix.
We’ve already seen what happened when HPE bought hyperconverged infrastructure vendor SimpliVity back in January 2017. Buying another vendor in the same space isn’t out of the question, as Nutanix and SimpliVity target enterprises of different sizes.
Prior to its acquisition by HPE, SimpliVity supported its hardware accelerator and software on servers from a variety of vendors. It also offered a hardware appliance, OmniCube, built on OEM servers from Dell. Now, though, HPE only sells SimpliVity as an appliance, built on its own ProLiant servers.
Customers of Nutanix who aren’t customers of HPE might justifiably be concerned — but they could just as easily worry about the prospects of an acquisition by IBM, the focus of earlier Nutanix rumors. IBM no longer makes...