M&A: EMC gobbled by Dell

By joe

October 12, 2015 - 2 minutes read - 310 words

Need to think how this will play out. The Register’s take is here. It seems that this will solve the “shareholder value” problem indicated by Elliot Management (e.g. they wanted more return on their investment). As part of the increasing the return and value return to shareholders, EMC had been in a cost cutting mode. Layoffs have been in process, and likely products trimmed or refocused. Once this goes through (assuming regulators won’t protest), Dell will have

Assuming that it keeps all of this, they will be a force to contend with. Not that either Dell or EMC are slouches now. But this is going to change a number of dynamics, quickly. First: Nutanix. Dell has been working with them closely. Will they keep doing this, or “roll their own” ? Likely an acquisition is not in the cards for Nutanix from Dell (they’ll be busy digesting EMC for quite some time). This leaves the door open to HP and Oracle to scoop them up, with the other one likely snarfing up Scality. Either way, the type of system that Nutanix represents would conflict with multiple bits of the EMC/Dell combo. I can’t imagine that working out well. Second: Competitors to Dell/EMC are likely going to go on an acquisition spree to shore up their own defenses. The largest storage vendor was just grabbed. Can NetApp be far off? HDS? I’d guess NetApp snarfed up by either IBM or HP. HDS by Oracle. Third: Specialist niche folks (Hyperconverged, SDN, big data, etc.) to counter Pivotal and others. I’ll call what I am guessing is going to happen a feeding frenzy. I could be (badly) wrong. This said, I think this acquisition is going to (strongly) make the case (more obvious) for folks like us with open hardware/software stacks. As we say, “Bricking not included.”