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Businesses The Almighty Buck

Dell is Considering a Sale To VMware in What May Be Tech's Biggest Deal Ever (cnbc.com) 94

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
CNBC reports: Dell Technologies could emerge as a public company through a reverse-merger with VMware, the $60 billion cloud computing company it already controls, according to people familiar with the matter. The reverse merger, whereby VMware would actually buy the larger Dell, would then allow Dell to be traded publicly without going through a formal listing. It would also likely be the biggest deal in tech industry history, giving investors who backed Dell's move to go private in 2013 a way to monetize their deal, while helping Dell pay down some of its approximately $50 billion debt.
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Dell is Considering a Sale To VMware in What May Be Tech's Biggest Deal Ever More

Dell is Considering a Sale To VMware in What May Be Tech's Biggest Deal Ever

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  • So Dells service will get even worse? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by greenwow ( 3635575 ) on Monday January 29, 2018 @01:46PM (#56028111)

    Never thought that could happen, but here we are.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Dell will now require you to install flash player to manage its hardware.
  • It's like how Sharp sold off all of its business divisions...
    ...or how IBM sold all of its divisions.

    If it's bringing in money, why not let it happily chug along?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      because they've over extended their financing, and would like to cash in sooner rather then 10-20 years from now

    • Re:Why get rid of a money maker? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Monday January 29, 2018 @03:36PM (#56028929)

      Because it allows the company to put more money in resources that make more money.
      Lets say you have a Lemonade stand.
      That sold Lemonade, and Cookies.
      Every glass of Lemonade makes a profit of $0.50
      Every cookie makes a profit of $0.25

      You find that Customers will buy a glass of Lemonade or a Cookie but rarely both.
      So lets say on average you make $75.00 a day on that one stand.

      Now your line at your stand is very long, so there are people leaving the line or just not waiting.
      You need to have an other stand, but you do not have the money to make a new stand and man it.
      So you sell your cookie recipe and rights to it for the cost of making a new stand plus some extra for an other employee.

      So now you can sell twice as much Lemonade as before, even at the expense of not having cookie sales. You end up with more money.
      Because you will now make $100.00 a day for each stand, with 2 stands you make $200.00 a day.

      So by selling off a profitable item and reinvesting its money, you now have 2.5 times the profit.

      • So by selling off a profitable item and reinvesting its money, you now have 2.5 times the profit.

        Or you can just make a decent product that people actually like without having to race to the bottom with your dozens of exactly-alike competitors, and end up with $200 BEELION in the bank, and NO long-term debt!

        In other words, you can be smart, like Apple; or just another "me too!" shitbox maker like Dell, circling the drain for the past 15 years or so...

      • I will just add that my daughter had a lemonade stand and she made more money then im making today. now she owns a lemonade factory. silver [silvergate.co.il]

  • Corporate Raiders (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 29, 2018 @01:51PM (#56028145)

    Right out of the Corporate Raiders playbook. Buy a company, bleed
    it dry, make it borrow (hence the 50 billion debt), and dump it, in this
    case to the public.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Even better:

      Buy a company, take it private, bleed it dry, go public again, repeat as often as desired.

  • Is this more or less a game on paper to get an infusion of cash for Dell, or could this actually have an effect on the VMWare business where I should be prepared for a chance of VMWare dying off?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by 110010001000 ( 697113 )
      You should always be prepared if your business depends on a closed source software company. They could drop a product and you would have no recourse. If you don't have the sourcecode you don't have anything.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by geek ( 5680 )

      I hope VMWare doesnt die off. They still have the best product for locally hosted VM's. Their pricing is what sucks and thats easily fixable.

      I also like Dell a lot lately. I just bought a Ryzen 7 1800X desktop from them an a decent 13 inch inspirion laptop. The prices are reasonable and the quality has been acceptable. If this merger/buyout thing improves them both then I'm all for it.

    • Re:I only have one question (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Rob Riggs ( 6418 ) on Monday January 29, 2018 @01:59PM (#56028205) Homepage Journal

      Is this more or less a game on paper to get an infusion of cash for Dell, or could this actually have an effect on the VMWare business where I should be prepared for a chance of VMWare dying off?

      If you are a shareholder in VMware, you're about to be screwed. If you think Dell will hang like an albatross around VMware's neck and you are a VMware customer, you're screwed. If you are an investor in Dell, your are about to spread the cost of your fuck-up on the public market, and specifically on VMware's other shareholders. (See stories hitting the wire that look like "VMware plunges on news...)

    • Re:I only have one question (Score:5, Interesting)

      by swb ( 14022 ) on Monday January 29, 2018 @02:56PM (#56028661)

      Who can tell?

      Dell has mostly re-branded themselves as DellEMC, which I think was supposed to be an upgrade for the Dell name to associate it with the EMC brand. That being said, I always thought buying EMC was just a gimmick to get VMware but in my exposure it sure seems like EMC won internally, and the Dell people were shoved aside.

      Overall, I don't understand their conflicting strategy. If you talk to a "Dell EMC" rep for more than 5 minutes, they will try to sell you their 3x overpriced EMC vxRail platform which is VMware vSAN on top of proprietary mini-blade chasis of like 4 nodes.

      The strange part of the whole hyperconverged storage/virtualization model coming out of DellEMC is that EMC is a major SAN vendor selling against its own brand/products, made worse by ALSO selling Nutanix which directly competes against VMware vSAN *and* the SAN business.

      I think the company is so big and has so much overlap they need to reconsider what they're doing and greatly trim product lines. I can't help but think VMware innovation is totally choked by being owned by a giant hardware company -- any innovative ideas that don't involve selling more and more expensive hardware will die on the vine. The hardware side can't adapt to emerging software defined storage unless its meant to boost VMware first. And of course everybody has to bow to EMC's giant portfolio lest someone mess with their accounts.

      I would have thought the smarter play for Dell would have been to have kept VMware as a wholly owned subsidiary but let it self-manage (even if self-managing didn't mean coding for Dell's proprietary platform) and then sell off EMC. EMC seems like the dinosaur whose market can't really ever grow that much because the products are too expensive for anything but Fortune 500.

    • I don't get it. If you have an IPO then you can sell shares. SOmething is missing here. I think the missing thing has to be that VMware will have to issue new shares. For something this big, It's existing shareholders will need to approve that or else the Board has to vested with the ability to sell a massive amount of new shares.

    • Is this more or less a game on paper to get an infusion of cash for Dell, or could this actually have an effect on the VMWare business where I should be prepared for a chance of VMWare dying off?

      If VMWare dies, check out https://www.proxmox.com/ [proxmox.com] . Not a drop in replacement I admit, but a very impressive open-source VM server. Something to keep in mind for emergencies.

      • Proxmox might be cool and all, but if you want something open that is on the same playing field as VmWare get Ovirt. If you get stuck you can always get paid red-hat support so you won't lose your job if it has issues. I have been very happy with a lab I built for DR using Ovirt amongst 3 servers all on a 10gigE setup and Gluster. The hardest part is the chicken and egg issue of setting up the cluster, but if you do it right you will be able to harness an awesome setup for hyper-converged that is fast and w
    • NO VM would get bought by someone else.

      What they are doing is making private debt (Dell) into public debt (VM Shareholders) so that the wealthy people who are owed a lot of money by get get it back and the risk/failure is pushed onto small share holders who lack to voting power to stop it.

      At this point, one of the wealthy people who pulled out early will get to buy the only asset worth anything (VMWare) cheaply and make even more money.

      This is why the share market is like a casino. The Wealth (call th

    • Like Bill Gates understood decades ago, if you're willing to need them, then yes they will screw you over.

      If you were already ready to switch to a different supplier if needed, then you don't need them and you won't get screwed by them unless you're an idiot.

  • This isn't surprising (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday January 29, 2018 @01:56PM (#56028173)
    Following the big tax cut most CEOs when asked said they'd spend the money on mergers and acquisitions. Expect to see more of these..
    • Yes. Good time to invest in the mid/large cap US market. It is going through the roof! Big business won.

      • Yes. Good time to invest in the mid/large cap US market. It is going through the roof! Big business won.

        And I'm winning as a stockholder and employee of same.... Wages/bonus increases, income tax reduction and my stock portfolio is doing very well. So big business won, and I won too as a result.

        • Not for your bonuses (Score:5, Insightful)

          by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday January 29, 2018 @02:20PM (#56028377)
          odds are those were planned well in advance (I suppose it's possible you're a C level employee, in which case bully for you). I haven't heard a peep about wage increases except from Walmart, and aside from Fox News all the analysts agree those wage increases were because the economy's recovered enough they have to pay more to keep workers, nothing to do with the tax cuts.

          Meanwhile the mergers and acquisitions are putting everybody's jobs at risk. After all, what's the first thing a company does after a M&A?

          • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

            by bobbied ( 2522392 )

            LOL... In the current labor market we are approaching nearly full employment. Historically, you simply don't get much under 4% nation wide because about that many are unable/unwilling to actually work at any wage. A bit of churn isn't going to be a huge issue, nor is it going to blow up the unemployment numbers. Mergers in this situation don't create unemployment, but grows productivity and drives GDP increases, which is an all around good thing.

            Currently we are starting to see labor shortages in some j

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by thaylin ( 555395 )

              Actually it has nothing to do with willingness/ability, but with people transitioning jobs. If you are unwilling/unable to work you are not on the unemployment rolls.

            • When companies merge (Score:4, Insightful)

              by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday January 29, 2018 @03:46PM (#56028999)
              they fire redundant staff. Sometimes even if the staff isn't redundant they lay people off to recover the costs associated with the merger and make the survivors work harder. If you've never experienced this first hand you are either very young or very lucky.

              Unemployment might not be as low as the stats make it look. If it really was 4% we should be seeing much, much stronger upward momentum on wages. So far it's barely keeping pace with inflation. Walmart's seems higher because they've been putting off pay raises for 7 or 8 years.

              • Ah, you assume way too much.. I hired on at a telecom that had just been merged from two companies in 2000 and kept that job for 12 years while the company went from 1200 employees to less than 500. I finally got the ax just before one of our customers purchased us to save money. The company apparently knew what was going to happen so they took pre-sale steps to adjust their books. So I've been there, done that. I've been left behind and the victim of a layoff. (The layoff was the best financial thing th

                • of constant productivity increases being told 'raises will come' rings hollow. GDP or not we'd recovered from the 2008 crash in less than 2 years. Wages dropped like a rock then as everybody (except CEOs) took paycuts. Every day I turn on the news and the stock market's hitting records but boo-hoo-hoo the GDP means we can't raise wages, meanwhile I read stuff like this [time.com]

                  We're in full trickle down mode (minus the trickle down, which never happens, just ask Kansas). This is what happens when you give all th

                  • Oh please spare me the Social utopian clap trap and class envy. It doesn't help your case.

                    On most of this we disagree. I guess we will simply have to wait and see if the "trickle down" part actually works. I think it will, you don't. Seems that it's doing pretty darned good right now and things are looking to get better, but you don't. So let's discuss how things are going in two more years or so...

                    Also, remember one simple fact.... Bulls and Bears are both eventually right. Which means that if you st

              • When companies merge they fire redundant staff.

                You say that like it's a bad thing. When you fire redundant staff, you improve the efficiency of the remaining staff, which will eventually result in higher pay for them. The staff who were fired are freed up to find other jobs where they can be productive elsewhere. The overall result is a net increase in aggregate productivity.

                It's like if a bridge was designed with 15 supports but only needs 12. If you can figure out a way to remove the 3 extra supp

      • before the inevitable crash. Hope you got somebody on the inside who lets you know when. Like these guys do [politico.com].
    • What is in the tax plan that encourages people to do that? I haven't heard.
  • There's a lot more money in a public company to cheat into your pockets, again.

  • Why is this even vaguely legal? If corporations are legally allowed to be persons, then why is it legal for one corporate person to buy and enslave another corporate person, and then turn around and sell that other person for profit?

    We must hold corporate persons to the same standards of behavior and ethics as other persons. President Trump excepted, of course.

  • Eat those words well, Michael Dell.

    Apple has ZERO long-term debt, and $200 BEELION in the bank.

    NOW who's laughing?!?

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