For almost a year, EMC held on-and-off merger discussions with HP which, according to recent news, had already ended. Financial terms and fear from both companies' shareholders who are against the deal may have caused the merger to be dropped. There is no indication whether such talk would be revived.
Dell, on its part, is far from thinking of a full takeover of EMC. However, it does have the option to explore buying assets, which would include the core storage business of the company.
Both EMC and HP declined to give further comments on the report. Dell may just be able to give a comment as long as the timing is within the regular business hours.
The proposed merger between EMC and HP would have been dubbed as the so-called merger of equals, resulting in the creation of a massive technology company that has a combined market value of almost $129 billion. However, the negotiations were concluded several weeks ago and said to revolve around difficult issues, which include the financial aspect of the deal.
EMC is made up of a collection of businesses wherein the largest stake is occupied by VMware, a virtualization software company. The CEO, Joe Tucci, is stepping down next year though no successor has been named just yet. The company has drawn the attention of hedge fund Elliott Management Corp. which had gained a stake in EMC in July. The $25 billion investment firm, which is run by Paul Singer, urged Tucci to spin off its stake in VMware. He explained that the move would boost the value of the two assets.
EMC owns around 80 percent of VMware, a leader in Software Defined Networking (SDN) with its NSX network virtualization platform. The acquisition occurred in 2004 and is said to have a total cost of $700 million. VMware's market value is reportedly at $40 billion. In 2013, VMware was attributed with around 22 percent of EMC's earnings, which reached $23.2 billion.
"VMware, which trades publicly, is now EMC's crown jewel, with a market capitalization of $40 billion, accounting for most of its parent company's value," said in a report.
Both HP and Dell are seriously working on expanding their data center businesses into SDN. The deal with EMC would be an important achievement to carriers as they develop data centers that could enhance cloud expansion. After all, EMC is a leading name when it comes to data center storage.
It's still unclear whether EMC would be looking at other deals. At this point, there's no sign that the company is selling its 80 percent stake in VMware.
