In its latest buy in a year-long M&A spree, Hewlett Packard Enterprise plans to acquire consultancy Cloud Technology Partners to beef up its expertise in hybrid IT.

HPE anticipates the deal, announced Tuesday, will close this month. It's not disclosing financial terms of the deal. CTP has more than 200 employees, and they will all be offered positions with HPE, according to a company spokesperson.

Founded in 2010, CTP helps IT organizations move to the cloud, use the cloud for innovation, and operate cloud infrastructure, Ana Pinczuk, senior vice president and general manager of HPE Pointnext said in a blog post announcing the acquisition on Tuesday. CTP has completed almost 500 enterprise cloud transformation projects and is cloud-agnostic, with expertise on multiple platforms including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google and OpenStack.

Chris Greendale, chairman and CEO of Cloud Technology Partners, is a former professional tennis player, venture capitalist and co-founder of several technology companies.

"Hybrid IT" is a phrase HPE uses to describe enterprises with infrastructure in the public cloud, private cloud and legacy on-premises. HPE sees hybrid IT as a big part of its business in the future.

Figure 1:

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"Achieving business outcomes requires putting each workload in the appropriate environment, whether it's in an on-premises data center, in a private cloud, on public clouds or offered as a SaaS application," Pinczuk says. Pointnext is an IT services organization built to simplify hybrid IT and implement edge computing, she explains.

HPE has been busy with mergers and acquisitions this year. It announced completion of its the $8.8 billion spin-off and merger of its enterprise software business with UK IT specialist Micro Focus on Friday. (See HPE Spins Software Business to Micro Focus for $8.8B .)

HPE bought AppDynamics, a provider of cloud monitoring technology for improving application and business performance, announcing the deal in January. (See Cisco Buying AppDynamics for $3.7B.)

Also in January, HPE announced plans to buy hyperconverged storage provider SimpliVity. (See HPE Buys SimpliVity for $650M in Hyperconverged Cloud Play.)

That same month, HPE announced plans to buy Cloud Cruiser, which provides analytics and software to measure the services used by customers. (See HPE Expands Cloud Offerings With Cloud Cruiser Acquisition.)

HPE announced pans to buy Niara, a startup providing behavioral analytics for security, in February. (See HPE Acquires Security Analytics Startup Niara.)

HPE announced plans to acquire Nimble Storage, a San Jose maker of flash and hybrid flash storage, in March. (See HPE Buying Nimble Storage for $1B.)

Also in March, HPE sold its OpenStack and Cloud Foundry assets, including developers and other staff and software, to SUSE. (See SUSE Getting Into Platforms and HPE: We're Not Dumping OpenStack & Cloud Foundry .)

HPE's hybrid IT strategy is in line with its competitors, including Dell and Cisco, as traditional enterprise providers are looking to hybrid cloud as a means of retaining and adding customers. (See 'Hey! You Got Public Cloud on My Premises!'.)

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— Mitch Wagner Editor, Enterprise Cloud News

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