Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced a definitive agreement to acquire SimpliVity, a leading provider of software-defined, hyperconverged infrastructure, for $650m in cash. The hyperconverged market was estimated to be approximately $2.4bn in 2016, and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 25%, to nearly $6bn, by 2020. By bringing together HPE’s best-in-class infrastructure, automation and cloud management software with SimpliVity’s industry leading software-defined data management platform, HPE and its partner ecosystem will deliver the industry’s only “built-for-enterprise” hyperconverged offering. “This transaction expands HPE’s software-defined capability and fits squarely within our strategy to make Hybrid IT simple for customers,” Meg Whitman, Hewlett Packard Enterprise President and CEO “More and more customers are looking for solutions that bring them secure, highly resilient, on-premises infrastructure at cloud economics. That’s exactly where we’re focused.”