One piece of data emerging out of the Dell Computer takeover bid for 3Par is that Frank Quattrone’s firm Qatlyst handled the transaction for 3Par with Credit Suisse representing Dell.

SiliconANGLE covered the news this morning.

According to a SiliconANGLE source close to the deal, Qatalyst represented 3Par in the Dell transaction. This puts Frank Quattrone back in the action in quietly getting to his old status of deal maker. As the market for M&A heats up can Frank get back to his old level of being a king maker on getting premium for deals.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Frank Quattrone is an American investment banker who started technology sector franchises at Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and Credit Suisse First Boston. He helped bring dozens of companies public during the 1990s tech boom, including Netscape, Cisco, and Amazon.com. Later he was prosecuted for interfering with a government probe into Credit Suisse First Boston’s behavior in allocating “hot” IPOs. The case was eventually dropped. He was earning roughly $160 million a year during his peak at the firm.

Storage is Hot – Cloud Market Is Expanding with Storage
Dell going after 3Par is causing a stir in the cloud and data storage market. As SiliconANGLE has been reporting all of this year, storage is hot and is the center of the cloud value proposition. On the heals of VMWorld this month we expect to see a ton of startups activity that might represent the hype seen decades ago when the venture capital industry saw storage go crazy during the PC revolution (aka Winchester hard drive deals).

Big companies will be adding to their cloud capabilities by either rolling out new virtualization capabilities or by buying companies who have put virtualization at the core of their storage architecture.

The acquisition is Dell’s latest move to control a large chunk of the cloud-computing industry–something the hardware manufacturer will need to do in order to remain competitive. Nearly half of Dell’s revenue comes from the sale of personal computers, and as business needs continue to grow around streaming IT department budgets, Dell will need to find additional ways in which to meet these needs.

Many are speculating on who will be acquired next. Dell announced that it plans to buy 3Par for roughly $1.3 billion in cash, or $18 a share. The purchase represents a massive 87% premium to the company’s recent closing price of $9.65.