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HPE Shopping Spree Continues With Purchase of This Cloud Specialist

September 5, 2017

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise said Tuesday that it will acquire Cloud Technology Partners, a Boston-based company that helps business customers plan and build cloud computing capabilities.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Seven-year-old CTP works with businesses to determine which cloud technology—be it from Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google, or the non-vendor aligned OpenStack—is best for the customer’s needs. It then helps corporate customers plan out how they will run their information technology on that cloud (or clouds, if spread out across multiple vendors).

CTP boasts of customers including agricultural cooperative Land O’Lakes and Avid Technology (avid, -4.44%), a specialist in multi-media software tools.

HPE (hpe, -0.26%) disclosed the news Tuesday in a blog post by Ana Pinczuk, senior vice president of the company’s PointNext unit. CTP will become part of PointNext, which provides IT deployment consulting and deployment services.

This is HPE’s fifth technology acquisition this year. In January, it snapped up data center hardware company Simplivity for $650 million. In March, it purchased Nimble Storage for $1.09 billion. Terms for the other two acquisitions—cloud analytics specialist Cloud Cruiser in January and security analytics player Niara the following month—were not disclosed.

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CTP has raised about $34 million from investors including Oak Investment Partners and Pritzker Group Venture Capital.

Since pre-split Hewlett-Packard downgraded its own ambition to compete with Amazon (amzn, -0.29%) and Microsoft (msft, -0.04%) in public cloud a few years back, it has focused more on helping customers pick the cloud solutions best for them and to help them run them

In her post, Pinczuk wrote that CTP’s consulting, design, and advisory services will bolster HPE’s own “hybrid IT” consulting expertise. HPE’s take is that most companies will continue to run some of their information technology in their own server rooms and other workloads in one or more public clouds. It offers services to make those deployment options easier.

“More and more, customers are seeking a trusted advisor who knows where the market is going, and can shape their long-term roadmap and provide the solutions that will allow them to keep pace in this digital world,” she wrote.

When the deal, expected to close this month, is complete, CTP’s 200 or so employees will move over to HPE bringing total headcount there to about 52,000.

   

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