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Dell, EMC Said To Be In Merger Talks (itworld.com)
itwbennett writes: According to a Wall Street Journal report (paywalled), Dell might buy some or all of storage giant EMC. (The grain of salt here is that the Journal's report cited unnamed sources, and cautioned that the companies might not finalize any agreement.) If the report has it right, though, "a total merger would be one of the biggest deals ever in the technology industry," writes Stephen Lawson for IDG, "with EMC holding a market value of about US$50 billion. It would also bring together two of the most important vendors to enterprise IT departments."
I've decided not to have any children
The world thanks you.
Dude, you got laid off!
Seriously, though, what a unholy mess that would be. EMC grew by acquiring a lot of other companies, then spinning them off, and not really doing a fantastic job of integrating anything, then laying off tens of thousands only to hire again. Dell has it's own history of being huge, then being private, now seemingly on the roll again. It would be a fitting end for the the execs at EMC that acquired and fired to get acquired and fired themselves, although the big difference will be that they will get some giant golden parachute.
I used to work for Dell- I remember at one of the company meetings, I think it was Michael Dell himself, referring to EMC as "Excess Margin Corporation" - of course this was before they were partnering on projects.
I don't know if you're joking, or have only dealt with Dell's consumer level stuff. Their "enterprise" level support is excellent and the products generally perform as advertised, if not better.
I'm not sure what Dell or EMC would gain out of this merger, if it is even true. Dell already owns Equallogic which covers the low to mid-range of the storage market pretty well in Dell's offerings.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
EMC, Cisco and VMWare are tied up in a sort of loose alliance to sell cloudy boxes to large companies (VBlock.) I wonder what would happen with that, and also whether Dell would own VMWare. That would be a pretty huge reversal of fortune for Dell. I guess that trip through privatization let them fix the company without being under the microscope every quarter. It seems to me that this would be a lesson for companies looking to IPO -- unless you need access to billions and billions of dollars in funding, being out of the public eye can be a good thing.
I honestly haven't looked at Dell hardware for a very long time, since most of the physical stuff we deploy is outside of the US and they have horrible international warranty service. Their low end consumer PCs are garbage and always have been, but I've heard the business lines of desktops, laptops and servers are still halfway decent.
Dell own Equallogic (low-to-mid) and Compellent (mid-to-high).
They already can't quite figure out how to merge the two systems and have been selling both. The inside story is that EQL will go away, but they never seem to go away and Compellent can't quite come up with a product as simple and cheap as EQL. The SC4020, rather than being an EQL with SAS expansion ends up being burdened by Compellent's over-complicated interface system and fiber-channel focused mindset, in addition to being more expensive than EQL (install by a CML certified technician is required, $$$). EQL setup is trivial, I can get one on line in less than an hour.
I think there's also an open question about the mid-long range future of Compellent's primary sales pitch, its automatic tiering of data between different disk speeds (like SSD, 15k and 7.2k) when the future of data storage looks increasingly like it will be all flash, at least for most of the market volume.
What does all that tiering overhead mean in a world dominated by flash? Maybe it makes sense for the absolute largest installs where petabytes are in play, but most of the Compellent installs I've seen have been a shelf of tier 1 and maybe 2 shelves of tier 3. And they're increasingly 10G iSCSI focused, passing on FC.
I can't figure out how they'd blend in EMC to this mix.
What they're probably after is controlling interest in VMware. This would give them a complete vertical play for virtualization, being able to supply compute, networking, storage and hypervisor. They would probably also be in a position to further a lot of network and storage virtualization with control over both sides of the equation, hardware an software.
I do wonder if there's a possible anti-trust question here. I also wonder how Microsoft would feel about it as well.
It's almost 2016, I don't think we can link a 486 anecdote to today. Plus, we are talking enterprise here - I don't upgrade systems after purchase, I buy new ones and excess pallets of "old" ones. Dell's UEFI and iDRAC support are quite nice now, if they buy EMC and start baking that into their products then NetApp and others are going to be in deep trouble.