Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has already made three acquisitions in 2017, and the rationale for all of them ties back to December 2015, when HPE unveiled its Composable Infrastructure strategy.
The most recent deal came this week in the form of Niara, a security startup that focuses on pinpointing and thwarting attacks that have already penetrated an enterprise's perimeter defenses. Niara's tools will be merged with ClearPass, HPE's wireless network security suite:
The Niara solution automatically establishes baseline characteristics for all users and devices across the enterprise, globally. After a baseline is established, the software actively looks for anomalous, inconsistent activities that may indicate a security threat. Investigating individual security incidents that can take up to 25 hours each via traditional manual processes can now be performed in less than a minute.
Last month, HPE paid $650 million for Simplivity, maker of "hyperconverged" appliances that combine compute, networking and storage along with a management software platform called Omnistack. Just days prior, it bought Cloud Cruiser, maker of software for optimizing IT usage and spending across public and private cloud environments.
These three assets build on Synergy, the hardware-software platform launched under the Composable Infrastructure rubric in December 2015. HPE describes Composable Infrastructure's design principles as following:
1. Fluid Resource Pools
a. Compute, storage and fabric networking that can be composed and recomposed to the exact need of the application
b. Boots up ready to deploy workloads
c. Supports all workloads - Physical, Virtual and Containerized.
2. Software Defined Intelligence
a. Self-discovers and self-assembles the infrastructure you need
b. Repeatable, frictionless updates
3. A Unified API
a. Single line of code to abstract every element of infrastructure
b. 100% infrastructure programmability
c. Bare-metal interface for Infrastructure as a Service
"HPE is aiming to provide a distinctly different, next-generation infrastructure suitable for supporting the radically different demands that the combination of distributed apps, IoT events, and AI interventions require," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland.
"The acquisition by Dell of EMC, including VMware, has put competitive pressure on HPE to deliver substantial capabilities sooner than their new rival in the 'new infrastructure’ market," he adds. "With three acquisitors already in 2017, HPE is is clearly demonstrating its determination to succeed in delivering sophisticated capabilities to their Composable Infrastructure program quickly."
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