Hewlett Packard Enterprises Buys America’s Most Storied Tech Company

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 30, 8:38PM EST · Published May 18, 8:20AM EDT

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Hewlett Packard Enterprises Buys America’s Most Storied Tech Company — © nespix / Getty Images

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (NYSE: HPE), itself part of the history of American tech, has bought Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY), the iconic maker of supercomputers. Bill Hewlett and David Packard started Hewlett Packard Enterprises’ predecessor 80 years ago. Cray began in 1972. While HP became known for PCs, Cray became known for the most powerful computers in the world.

HP was broken into two pieces in 2015 that between them had a market cap reaching into the tens of billions of dollars. Cray had a market cap of about $1 billion when HPE made its offer. Its shares rose 22% on the announcement of the deal to $36.52. That is at the top of its 52-week trading range, which has a low of $18.76.

HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri commented on the deal:

Answers to some of society’s most pressing challenges are buried in massive amounts of data. Only by processing and analyzing this data will we be able to unlock the answers to critical challenges across medicine, climate change, space and more. Cray is a global technology leader in supercomputing and shares our deep commitment to innovation. By combining our world-class teams and technology, we will have the opportunity to drive the next generation of high performance computing and play an important part in advancing the way people live and work.

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While the deal may be good for Cray’s shareholders, one of America’s oldest true tech companies is no longer independent.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.