Dell Inc. today closed its $67 billion deal to buy EMC Corp., taking on the name Dell Technologies and sealing what the Wall Street Journal called the largest technology merger in history.
The new company, to remain in Hopkinton, Mass. where EMC was based, will have annual revenue of about $74 billion and a worldwide workforce of about 140,000. It claims to serve 98 percent of the Fortune 500. Overall, the new combined company seems likely to focus on the private and hybrid cloud — which wholly or partly puts computing into data centers owned and operated by end-users — to head off public-cloud juggernaut Amazon Web Services and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft Azure.
“We plan to be the trusted provider of infrastructure for the next Industrial Revolution,” said Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell during a call with reporters and analysts this morning.
Though also dealing with software, the combined company is mainly known for PCs, servers, storage and networking hardware — items that are tending to see either sales declines or increasing commoditization as more and more computing is put into the cloud, where generic hardware prevails. But Dell, as a maker of so-called white-label, or generic, servers, could stand to gain from that transition. And EMC dominates the burgeoning market for hyper-converged infrastructure, an unpleasant-sounding but genuine technology that integrates compute, storage, networking and virtualization resources in a commodity hardware box supported by a single vendor
Privately held Dell bought not only EMC but that firm’s federation of wholly and partially owned subsidiaries, including cybersecurity firm RSA Security LLC, software-development company Pivotal Software Inc., cloud-software company Virtustream and virtualization software vendor VMware, which will remain public.
The deal has turned former competitors into partners. Where once Dell competed with IBM and HPE for PC market share, those companies are important partners of VMware, as Fortune noted. VMware is run as an entirely separate company, with its own publicly traded stock, and that isn’t expected to change. Michael Dell today became chairman of VMware’s board.
VMware and EMC both announced layoffs in January, and TechCrunch predicts there are more to come as the companies consolidate.
