HPE plans to acquire Boston-based Cloud Technology Partners, which helps clients deploy cloud computing on multiple vendors, to be HPE's 5th acquisition in 2017
its fifth acquisition in 2017 Hewlett Packard Enterprise : HPE to Acquire Cloud Technology Partners to Strengthen Expertise in Cloud Consulting Services James / CloudTech : HPE to acquire Cloud Technology Partners to bolster consulting services Brandy Betz / Seeking Alpha : HPE announces acquisition intent for cloud consulting company Ron Miller / TechCrunch : HPE scoops up Cloud Technology Partners to boost hybrid cloud consulting Natalie Gagliordi / ZDNet : HPE to acquire consulting firm Cloud Technology Partners
Context & Ripple Effects
The $650M SimpliVity purchase in January already showed HPE buying its way down the cloud stack this year; Cloud Technology Partners extends the same campaign from infrastructure into the advisory layer, adding consultants who deploy workloads across multiple vendors rather than pushing one platform.
It slots alongside the earlier Cloud Cruiser deal for cloud-spend monitoring as the second cloud-services-flavored buy of 2017, and it foreshadows the pattern HPE kept running through the decade — asset purchases like MapR's assets in 2019 and the $374M Zerto deal in 2021 all point the same direction: hardware revenue alone no longer carries the company.
First-order effects
- HPE's consulting arm gains vendor-neutral cloud deployment expertise it could not credibly build in-house, letting it sell architecture advice across AWS, Azure, and private clouds instead of only HPE-branded stacks.
- Boston-based Cloud Technology Partners' staff and client relationships move under an owner whose core business is selling the very infrastructure those engagements often recommend against — a tension every client engagement will now have to manage.
Second-order effects
- Boutique multi-vendor cloud consultancies become acquisition targets for every large hardware vendor facing the same gap, compressing the pool of independent advisors enterprises can hire without a vendor agenda.
- Consulting engagements become a funnel for HPE's own infrastructure and software lines — SimpliVity hyperconverged gear, Cloud Cruiser spend tools — shifting deal economics from one-time hardware sales toward attached services and recurring software.
Third-order effects
- If the cadence holds — SimpliVity, Cloud Cruiser, then MapR and Zerto later — HPE is assembling a hybrid-cloud software-and-services portfolio around its server business, the classic specialist-absorption path where independent cloud experts disappear into the vendors they used to evaluate objectively.
- Enterprises lose neutral third-party guidance as capability acquisitions consolidate the advisory market, raising the odds that 'multi-vendor strategy' advice gets written by companies with hardware quotas.
The trend: Enterprise hardware makers are acquiring their way from boxes into cloud consulting and software, absorbing the independent specialists that once advised customers across vendors.