Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is acquiring SimpliVity for $650 million in cash, a price not nearly as high as the $3.8 billion rumored in November.

The deal, announced today, would give HPE some competitive leverage against Nutanix, the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) player that went public last year and has a market capitalization of $4.27 billion.

While HCI is a hot market, it wasn't enough to sustain Westborough, Massachusetts-based SimpliVity's plans to go public. In fact, the Register reported in October that SimpliVity was trying to raise money.

After the deal's close, which is expected to come before the end of April, HPE would continue offering its own HCI products, the HC 380 and the HC 250.

SimpliVity's real prize is its OmniStack software, which it sells pre-installed on servers from Cisco, Dell, Huawei, or Lenovo. HPE is saying it would continue to support those platforms.

However, HPE will also begin prepping its own ProLiant DL380 servers to run OmniStack, with integrated products expected to emerge in the second half of the year.

Lots of large cogs have been coming and going at HPE. The company recently announced the acquisition of SGI, but more importantly, it's shed some large businesses. Using spin-merger deals, HPE first spun off its Software business (not literally all software, but the unit that was named Software) to Micro Focus, then sold OpenStack and Cloud Foundry assets to SUSE.

HPE shares were down 1 percent at $22.69 at the start of after-hours trading.