Slashdot Mirror
Dell is Considering a Sale To VMware in What May Be Tech's Biggest Deal Ever (cnbc.com)
CNBC reports: Dell Technologies could emerge as a public company through a reverse-merger with VMware, the $60 billion cloud computing company it already controls, according to people familiar with the matter. The reverse merger, whereby VMware would actually buy the larger Dell, would then allow Dell to be traded publicly without going through a formal listing. It would also likely be the biggest deal in tech industry history, giving investors who backed Dell's move to go private in 2013 a way to monetize their deal, while helping Dell pay down some of its approximately $50 billion debt.
Following the big tax cut most CEOs when asked said they'd spend the money on mergers and acquisitions. Expect to see more of these..
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If you are a shareholder in VMware, you're about to be screwed. If you think Dell will hang like an albatross around VMware's neck and you are a VMware customer, you're screwed. If you are an investor in Dell, your are about to spread the cost of your fuck-up on the public market, and specifically on VMware's other shareholders. (See stories hitting the wire that look like "VMware plunges on news...)
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
LOL... In the current labor market we are approaching nearly full employment. Historically, you simply don't get much under 4% nation wide because about that many are unable/unwilling to actually work at any wage. A bit of churn isn't going to be a huge issue, nor is it going to blow up the unemployment numbers. Mergers in this situation don't create unemployment, but grows productivity and drives GDP increases, which is an all around good thing.
Currently we are starting to see labor shortages in some job markets, where qualified applicants are getting difficult to find. This is driving wages up and sucking people who'd not normally work, back into the market. The labor participation rate is going up, unemployment is approaching historical lows. The last time we had this rate was 17 years ago. IF it drops much more, it will be the lowest unemployment rate seen in my 50+ year life. A few layoffs won't be a huge issue, unless it happens to be you getting laid off, but you will likely find a new job quickly.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Who can tell?
Dell has mostly re-branded themselves as DellEMC, which I think was supposed to be an upgrade for the Dell name to associate it with the EMC brand. That being said, I always thought buying EMC was just a gimmick to get VMware but in my exposure it sure seems like EMC won internally, and the Dell people were shoved aside.
Overall, I don't understand their conflicting strategy. If you talk to a "Dell EMC" rep for more than 5 minutes, they will try to sell you their 3x overpriced EMC vxRail platform which is VMware vSAN on top of proprietary mini-blade chasis of like 4 nodes.
The strange part of the whole hyperconverged storage/virtualization model coming out of DellEMC is that EMC is a major SAN vendor selling against its own brand/products, made worse by ALSO selling Nutanix which directly competes against VMware vSAN *and* the SAN business.
I think the company is so big and has so much overlap they need to reconsider what they're doing and greatly trim product lines. I can't help but think VMware innovation is totally choked by being owned by a giant hardware company -- any innovative ideas that don't involve selling more and more expensive hardware will die on the vine. The hardware side can't adapt to emerging software defined storage unless its meant to boost VMware first. And of course everybody has to bow to EMC's giant portfolio lest someone mess with their accounts.
I would have thought the smarter play for Dell would have been to have kept VMware as a wholly owned subsidiary but let it self-manage (even if self-managing didn't mean coding for Dell's proprietary platform) and then sell off EMC. EMC seems like the dinosaur whose market can't really ever grow that much because the products are too expensive for anything but Fortune 500.