The usual amount of rumors about EMC and its subsidiary VMware reached an unprecedented level when a suspect number of stock options were traded over the last week.
The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and others are reporting at least a couple of rumors:
- EMC may be acquired by Cisco
- EMC may finally spin-off VMware
The first scenario is particularly interesting: Cisco dreams a liquid computing future but at the moment the company has a firm leadership only in the networking area; EMC and VMware could fill the holes in the storage and platforms area to complete the vision.
As further confirmation that something is about to happen, in July the company’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data Center, Switching and Services Group answered the question:
Q: Do you plan to invest in another hypervisor vendor, similar to your relationship with VMware?
A: No announcements to date. We’re continuing to work with all the hypervisor vendors. We are interested in virtualized data centers and to the extent that hypervisor and virtualized servers exist in the data center we think that’s a very powerful construct for customers and one that’s going to take network support.
Nonetheless in June the company’s CEO, John Chambers, explicitly said that Cisco is not interested in buying VMware. Maybe that was an attempt to clarify that EMC has to sell all or nothing.
Some financial analysts expect the news to be announced later today, at the Pacific Crest Technology Conference, where both EMC and VMW are present.
Update: The EMC calendar for investors now includes an announcement set for tomorrow August 5 @ 10am EST.
The speaker will be Dave Donatelli, President of Storage Division.
Second Update: virtualization.info has received an anonymous tip suggesting that tomorrow EMC will unveil its CLARiiON CX4.
This is more than enough to justify the announcement planned for tomorrow, but it seems not enough to explain the abnormal trade of options of last week.