British boss of cloud computing firm at centre of takeover battle between Hewlett-Packard and Dell lands massive reward

The British boss of a little-known Silicon Valley data storage company, 3Par, is set to become one of the UK’s wealthiest technology moguls, scooping a personal fortune of $96m (£65m) following a bid battle for the loss-making business between Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

David Scott, 3Par’s chief executive, is the son of a Jamaican father and an English mother. The 48-year-old was born in the Caribbean but grew up in London and studied computer science at Bristol University.

After a titanic two-week takeover fight in which HP and Dell repeatedly out-bid each other to get their hands on the company, 3Par, which is based near San Francisco, today agreed to sell itself for $2.35bn to Hewlett-Packard. The sale price, $33 a share, is three times the amount at which 3Par’s stock was changing hands on Wall Street before the battle began and is a sign of enthusiasm for so-called “cloud computing”.

Scott, who has run the company since 2001, has a 4.6% stake in 3Par and will be the biggest individual winner from the deal. He said: “On behalf of the company, we’re all on cloud nine.”

The struggle for 3Par took Wall Street by surprise and left technology analysts open-mouthed. A hitherto obscure loss-making company, 3Par specialises in providing equipment that allows companies to store vast amounts of data remotely, reducing the need for bulky, expensive in-house server hardware. 3Par argues that the corporate world is in a long-term transition towards purchasing storage from third parties as a utility – on the same basis as electricity or gas supply.

Texas-based Dell initially struck a deal to buy 3Par for $1.13bn on 16 August. But a few days afterwards, HP trumped this offer and as a tit-for-tat auction broke out, the valuation attached to 3Par surged from $18 to $33.

For Scott, the buyout means a return to a former employer. He joined HP’s British operation from university and worked for the computer firm as a systems engineer and a salesman for eight years before transferring to its Californian base in 1991. He left HP in 2001 to become boss of 3Par, founded just 21 months earlier.

Scott, who has an Iranian wife and a seven-year-old daughter, has positioned 3Par as environmentally friendly, stressing the energy consumption required to power and cool traditional servers. He has argued that using 3Par’s technology could cut consumption by tens of millions of barrels of oil annually. But until last month, investors were unconvinced, with the shares languishing below $10.

“We spent a lot of time last year being the beast of the stock market,” Scott told an industry blog last week. “Being the beauty feels a lot better.”

Analysts praised the way Scott played off Dell and HP to secure an unlikely seeming premium price for the company.

“3Par have played it extremely well,” said Toan Tran, a technology expert at research firm Morningstar. “They were right to get two players involved and they knew they were in a position of relative strength – there’s not another independent storage provider doing quite what they do.”

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