
Dell Closes $60B Merger with EMC - jonbaer
http://www.wsj.com/articles/dell-closes-60-billion-merger-with-emc-1473252540
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chollida1
The new company services 98% of all fortune 500 companies. That's a pretty
incredible reach. And 140,000 employee's. If I were a betting main, I'd expect
that number to drop in the very near term.

Selfishly I'm very interested in following a private Dell,as tech tends to
lead to huge companies in monopoly/winner take all verticals. Dell being
private is a decent case study to see how well a private company does against
its public counterparts, specifically wrt short vs long term investment.

If you were wondering how the new company is doing post merger...

Moody's just upgraded Dell's credit rating from Ba2 to Ba1 following the
merger. They claim that even though the new entity has significant amounts of
debt and leverage, its overall credit profile has been upgraded.

The tracking stock, DVMT, that EMC owners were given has traded pretty well
since it was released, it's slightly up, so atleast people who want out of the
new entity have an easy avenue.

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johansch
I'm just fascinated by the fact that in 2016 there are still huge companies
like this making their money on ancient tech that is insanely overpriced to
the alternatives.

(~20 years ago when I started working in software I thought I would eventually
get how these enterprise software giants actually were worth it. The more I
learn and age...)

In the end I guess what companies like Dell and EMC do is to provide access to
tech that otherwise (because of cultural reasons) is not available to non-tech
companies. But.. anyway, all of this seems like it's ripe for disruption.

~~~
2close4comfort
It is solid state will be the first place that EMC has faltered. And it has
NOTHING to offer. XtremIO doesn't count because it is going to be deprecated
soon and still is not a part of vBlock so its future is sketchy.

~~~
parasubvert
Eh? XtremIO is selling like bananas, they're like 40%+ of the all flash
market. (I don't work for EMC but I do work in the DellTech federation and
talk to people).

Thing is, much of that stuff is transitioning to software-defined storage
eventually. But that's what VSAN and ScaleIO are about.

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internal_tools
The Dell-EMC merger itself is fascinating, but really stands above it is all
the other company's that EMC owns: VMWare, Spring, Pivotal, RSA Security, and
a whole stable of backup/recovery companies.

All of these have deep inroads in the enterprise and really makes working on
Dell-owned products opaque to the user. It's like Dell has become, or will
soon become, the Koch Industries of the computing world.

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jasonjei
Dell tried to get into the cloud services market a long time ago, and didn't
succeed. VMware is a weird case too, especially with containerization and
cloud service vendors being cheaper to use than building your own cloud. If
Dell is trying to make their own cloud, I wonder if they'll succeed this time.
Some people have said that ship has sailed for them. Then again, a company
like Google has made a compelling competitor to AWS.

~~~
tracker1
My hope is they'll actually put some resources into bringing VMWare current,
and more open as an option, closer to how they were a few years back. ESXi is
still a pretty nice server, but running a local/free version instance has
become difficult with a few pitfalls if you do the wrong things somewhere...
You're all but stuck with windows-only mgt software instead of a web-
management interface.

I'd like to see dell go closer to the Redhat model when it comes to VMWare
after this closes out. Which would be a stark contrast to prior efforts. Also
of interest would be offering "private cloud" hardware/software options. Would
be very cool to have a turn-key solution for self-cloud hosting, and with
VMWare's work so far, they might be in a better position to actually integrate
docker as a solution than others, despite being different than their prior
efforts.

~~~
newman314
If you are running the latest versions of ESXi, you might be interested in
this.

[https://labs.vmware.com/flings/esxi-embedded-host-
client](https://labs.vmware.com/flings/esxi-embedded-host-client)

Without going into more detail, VMware recognizes that Flash is a dead end and
is working on converting things to HTML5. I'm fairly happy with the direction
they are heading towards from a UI standpoint although I still mostly do
things via CLI.

To your other points, you might want to check out Cloud Foundation.

Disclaimer: not a VMware employee, just a customer.

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2trill2spill
I hope Dell does not screw up EMC Isilon, because Isilon is a big contributor
to the FreeBSD project and it would suck to lose their contributions. The link
below shows the over 3,000 commits they have made to the FreeBSD project over
the years.

[https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?project=freebsd&q=emc](https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?project=freebsd&q=emc)

~~~
afraidknot
Not quite on the same scale, but they do care -
[https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?project=freebsd&q=dell](https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?project=freebsd&q=dell)

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walrus01
You, too, need a $200,000 SAN with software licensing costs, even if you don't
know it yet! Even if you're a small business that would be served well by two
machines with mdadm raid6 and Linux drbd.

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89vision
Funny, I just got back from an interview with EMC. Would now be a good time to
take a position?

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jdpedrie
My dad works for EMC, and he's fairly bullish on the whole situation.

~~~
xadhominemx
Why is that? Feels like AWS and Azure are bad for pretty much every aspect of
their business. Genuinely curious.

~~~
jdpedrie
There's a lot of companies that need or prefer on-prem or non-cloud offerings
for storage. EMC does really well in enterprise services, and likely will
continue to do well.

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smartbit
Nice comment by Trevor Pott
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/07/my_dell_merger_wish_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/07/my_dell_merger_wish_list/)

> More precisely, they didn't understand their own irrelevance.

> EMC's brass – along with that of many other tech companies – believed in a
> sort of manifest destiny. Their corporate largesse and sheer market share
> meant that they could dictate terms to customers. They believed, seemingly
> honestly, that this would persist.

...

> To this end, my wish list for EMC II revolves around R&D. Dell: please let
> EMC II experiment. Let them try new things. Above all let them fail.

Archive link [http://archive.is/tYQy7](http://archive.is/tYQy7)

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rosstex
This good be a great break for competitors like Pure Storage, Nimble, etc.

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biztos
I know some really smart and _very_ ambitious people who went to work for EMC
over the last few years. Just as a wild guess, I bet there's huge money being
made there and very fat bonuses to the people who are seen as delivering it.

Hope the Delliverse works out for them.

~~~
loeg
Very modest bonus in the trenches. RSUs granted before October 2015 vest early
(today). You could buy a nice new car, but not a yacht. (I couldn't buy a
Model S with my buyout bump, for example, although I'm sure some others are
seeing bigger bonuses.)

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shmerl
So Dell owns VMware now?

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Mac2125
Yes, but keeping it as its own entity.

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donretag
And VMWare owns SpringSource. So basically the Spring framework is owned by
Dell.

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walterclifford
> And VMWare owns SpringSource

VMware hasn't owned SpringSource since Pivotal was created in 2013
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpringSource](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpringSource)
(i.e. "the Spring framework is owned by Dell" is still accurate, but not
through Dell owning VMware)

~~~
donretag
I was under the assumption that VMWare owned Pivotal after it was spun off. I
would assume at the least that VMware owns a large share.

~~~
parasubvert
Pivotal is mostly owned by Dell/EMC (60%), followed by VMware (22.5%), and the
balance by GE (10%), Ford (5%) and Microsoft (2.5%). The percentages are
educated guesses based on the original 70/30 split EMC-VMware.

The reason I think is that a lot of the of the revenue producing assets came
from EMC (Pivotal Labs and Greenplum), VMware had SpringSource & GemFire which
were decent revenue, but Cloud Foundry made no money until 2014+ (and now
accounts for a large chunk of revenue).

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janeFondler
Is it going to help them make better computers?

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unixhero
Whoa

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oDot
Now that this is done they go on and make a ~1.3-1.5kg XPS 15 with a 4K screen
that lasts > 9 hours.

Please.

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matthewhall
This took so long... they announced this in like 2013

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parasubvert
more like October 2015: under a year.

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ArkyBeagle
While I agree with the DOJ decision on the Halliburton-Baker Hughes acq. (
even though it may have cost me a job ( but probably not - they were headed
full-on Luddite well before ) ) it's really interesting that the same logic
does not apply when it's explicitly technology.

I wouldn't wish Dell on anyone - although they've done what's necessary to be
the leader.

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throwthisaway00
Dell will fail because of a systemic problem of hiring poorly skilled and
educated engineers. An analogy to cancerous cells in the body multiplying and
spreading is not such a stretch. Dell needs a very invasive treatment to
eradicate gobs and gobs of worthless engineers and do-nothing mid-level
management.

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jhall1468
Now that the merger is complete a purge is inevitable. Whether or not they get
rid of the correct employees remains to be seen.

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signa11
> Whether or not they get rid of the correct employees remains to be seen

does that ever happen ?

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benmcnelly
Depends on which employees you ask later ;-)

