Citing “people familiar with the matter,” The Wall Street Journal is reporting that EMC has recently held merger talks with HP and Dell. The sources say that the talks with HP recently broke down over financial disagreements and that Dell is interested only in acquiring a portion of EMC, likely its core data storage business. Analysts and industry observers say that Cisco and Oracle could be other potential merger partners.
EMC is a large player in the enterprise storage market. It also owns 80 percent of VMware, known for its virtualization software, and it has a stake in the cloud computing spinoff Pivotal. J.P. Morgan Chase is said to be advising EMC as it seeks a merger.
