This makes sense to me as a former sales engineer. There were many phonecalls and meetings where Nimble was the main competition for the customer's storage doll

This makes sense to me as a former sales engineer. There were many phonecalls and meetings where Nimble was the main competition for the customer's storage dollars, pretty much regardless of technical merits we may bring up. "We went with Nimble because it was cheaper" was heard more than once. With Dell EMC having a large combined storage portfolio, I'm sure HPE was feeling it. Buying Nimble has multiple advantages between getting a foot in the door for more HPE equipment, or just cornering that niche in the market.