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Dell To Buy EMC For $67 Billion (nytimes.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the go-big-or-go-home dept.

im_thatoneguy writes: After days of rumors, the NY Times is reporting that Dell will in fact be acquiring storage company (and VMWare parent) EMC in a record $67B deal being financed by a consortium of banks. Dell has confirmed the deal on their website.

Under the deal, Dell will pay $33.15 a share, which represents a premium even on top of EMC's current value, which had already jumped on initials rumors of a $50B acquisition last week. However, insiders say the deal won't be a straight forward cash buy-out of stock holders. Instead, EMC investors will receive about 70% in cash and the remainder in what's called a Tracking Stock, which will track the performance of just the VMWare Division within the new organization.

7 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. I'm glad, now, ... by Drewdad · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...that I didn't get that job with VMware.

    1. Re:I'm glad, now, ... by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      VMWare seems like the unit that would actually be making money. However the licenses are really expensive, there are much affordable alternatives out there, but there are still too many muckety-mucks out there who think the most expensive product is still the best, and they should only get the best. However those free/cheaper solutions may or may not be as good, but you may be able to deal with greater growth for less.

      Not that VMWare is bad, it is a good product, it is just really expensive, to the point where you can consider getting additional low end servers vs virtualizing them.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    2. Re:I'm glad, now, ... by swb · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think the core virtualization services are tough to beat. Where I work we do both VMware and Hyper-V, and while Hyper-V is pretty close in features most of us that work with both prefer VMware -- there are just too many weird cases where Hyper-V just doesn't work right, but it is popular among cost-cutters.

      Not that VMWare is bad, it is a good product, it is just really expensive, to the point where you can consider getting additional low end servers vs virtualizing them.

      The problem with this is that with virtualization you get VM backup and a lot of storage efficiencies you'd never get with single servers, not to mention high availability or hardware replacement. I'm pretty sure low end licenses like Essentials Plus are still cheaper even at 3-4 VMs than additional physical hardware, especially if you have to do better than "low end servers". I'm sure there's some extreme cheapskate math that works in the more hardware method, but you sacrifice a lot of flexibility and you have to also deal with great switching port counts.

      IMHO, the problem VMware has is largely that the problem of virtualization is mostly solved and it's hard to grow the business without coming up with lots of add-ons.

  2. Your mortgage got you stressed? by willworkforbeer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Imagine the pressure of waking up every day with a US$60Billion debt over your head. No pressure, sales weasels, no pressure at all.

    --
    Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
    1. Re:Your mortgage got you stressed? by willworkforbeer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Who cares? It is not my debt, it is my company's debt. I can take a vacation to Hawaii, while the company crashes and burns (ie sheds/restructures debt through bankruptcy proceedings).

      If you believe this kind of deep leverage will not affect the cultures at these companies, from the top down, you're probably mistaken.

      --
      Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
    2. Re:Your mortgage got you stressed? by gtall · · Score: 4, Informative

      The auto industry paid most of the money back. Depending upon accounting rules, the U.S. lost approx. $9.8 billion to $16 billion. However, this does not count the dent in the U.S. economy and ultimately the tax receipts of NOT bailing out the auto industry (actually, just GM and Chrysler). That dent would have been very large and many people thrown out of work, not least the supply chain for that industry. There is a similar story with the banks paying their wad back.

      Whether you like it or not, a government is a giant insurance policy. We use it to protect the people from getting whacked, something the whiners about the ACA conveniently forget (would that we were all rich and employed). One can argue the banks and Wall Street are too big, and I'd heartily support breaking the former up and reducing the influence of the latter or at least taxing those leeches a lot more.

  3. Will they corrupt VMware? by swb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My worry about this is that Dell will corrupt VMware with hardware-specific "features".

    One thing that's been kid of nice about VMware up to this point is that they have been fairly hardware agnostic, which I think improves the innovation of pure virtualization. My worry is that with Dell ownership, they will put pressure on VMware to develop features which give an advantage to Dell hardware solutions.

    Maybe it'd be ultimately beneficial to further SDN or SDS, which seem hobbled by a lack of standards at the hardware interface level but I doubt such integration would be oriented at vendor-neutral public standards and more oriented towards monopoly standards.