Merging HP and EMC – hold on, wait, hear us out. The cap is still on the bottle of crazy pills

Does an EMC-HP merger make more sense now than last year when the two titans' inability to agree on a price put a stop to the idea? HP could join the EMC Federation as a servers-and-networking business, and stand alongside EMC II (EMC Information Infrastructure, aka storage), VMware (virtual server software), and Pivotal (big- …

[circusmole]

Hmmm...

...was this the hidden agenda behind the HP split?

[Anonymous Coward]

If HP was interested in this...

They could have achieved it by selling their current enterprise-facing divisions to EMC, without the intermediate step and disorganization caused by spinning off printers/PCs and re-orging everything else into HP Enterprise.

So my guess is "No, this is not on the radar."

(Also, from the purely sarcastic El Reg commentard perspective, I have to ask "What? So now that Comcast/Time Warner Cable is dead somebody has decided that we need a new unholy mongrelized corporate abomination to make us fear for our future sanity?")

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: If HP was interested in this...

No, you are wrong: splitting the company into two provides shareholder value for both parts of the business. Shareholders would (or 'could have') been cheated if the enterprise side of the business was simply sold off.

[x 7]

First law of business regarding the IT industry:

Any corporate takeover or amalgamation involving HP is doomed to fail

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

>First law of business regarding the IT industry:

Any THING involving HP is doomed to fail

[Anonymous Coward]

It used not to be so. Then Carly turned up and a reverse takeover was mounted by Compaq.

[luis river]

HP successful merger´s

Really? Compaq gave HP the scepter of managerial servers, 3com and Huawei to transform in the second player in switches and routers, 3PAR in an unquestionable leader in storage, Autonomy contribute with incredible software tech ,Mercury idem etc... etc without offending but people don't know what says

[Anonymous Coward]

FUD?

<tinfoil hat>

I wonder....... would an activist investor get someone to fling all sorts of poo (or "Comment" as it is called here) at a company so they increase the FUD among that companies shareholders? I suppose they would. This may give said activist investors some more backers when they start their proxy war shenanigans so they can balls up that company by making them sell off the better performing parts of a company.

Even though EMC reached a agreement with the sharks to stop with the overt shit-stirring (http://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2015/01/12/elliott-management-reaches-standstill-with-emc-amid-breakup-push/) it appears they are still at the covert shit-stirring.

</tinfoil hat>

I _really_ dislike that bollox Elliott. I am starting to dislike Mellor.

[Nathan Brathahn]

Makes sense to me

In the age of certified cloud stacks and hyper converged boxes, VMWare,HP and EMC could act more agressive on the market than VMWare, _CISCO_ and EMC and gain market share from business that was scared off by Ciscos UCS price tag.

Microsoft and DELL allready have this kind of cooperation where you even get your DELL firmware updates from Microsoft (not discussing the quality of MS updates in generale here)

[Anonymous Coward]

and then...

this would force a Cisco take over of NetApp and the age of independent storage vendors would truly be over.

[Jim Preis]

NOW I understand why Google is buying Maybelline.

[bowaters]

culture

In the US, the corporate cultures are so drastically different. I assume one side of the merged company gets the shaft & layoffs on that one.

[Archaon]

There goes the neighbourhood.

I agree that the server and networking parts of HP would fit well. Certainly has more potential than the troubled Cisco-EMC relationship. But if the HP storage products get binned off in place of EMC's products, they can pretty much say goodbye to the lower end business.

Oh well, being a multi-vendor whore has some perks.