EMC calls sudden event to reveal 'New business development'

EMC has given US media less than 24 hours notice of an event at which it will announce a “new business development”.

The event will take place at 0930, Eastern Time, an hour after the company announces its Q3 earnings.

Bloomberg reports the announcement will be Cisco's departure as an active participant in the VCE joint venture, which will be absorbed into EMC. The newswire says Cisco will keep its stake and EMC will start to count VCE revenue as its own.

Other possible reasons for a snap announcement that occur to The Reg include:

• An announcement about Cloudfather Joe Tucci's future and/or successor;
• A response to activist investors' calls for VMware to be sold off, which could mean sale some of the 80 per cent of Virtzilla stock EMC holds;
• EMC spent a long time chatting to HP about a merger, so let's not rule out the possibility of parallel discussions with another titan;
• A colossal acquisition, even if the likes if IBM's storage business don't look particularly appetising.

If Bloomberg's assertion is correct, it confirms long-held suspicions that Cisco finds it increasingly unpleasant to play in VCE when its partners – EMC and VMware – compete with it on so many fronts. Cisco retaining its stake and continuing to receive a share of profits while retaining a channel for UCS and networking kit sales isn't a terrible exit strategy. VCE's reputed billion-dollar run rate would be a handy boost to EMC as conventional array sales decline. Operating VCE outright would also give EMC a stronger “we're building the next mode of IT” story. EMC's "federated" structure would give VCE room to breathe, so it might not look odd for the storage titan to become a converged systems vendor.

The plot thickens, however, when one considers that EMC has already signalled it will once again become a server-maker, at least for its version of VMware's hyperconverged EVO appliances.

Somewhere in a filing cabinet at EMC is Data General's “how to make servers” manual. If Cisco wants nothing more than a revenue stream, EMC folks might be dusting it off as we speak. Either that, or asking who else might be interested in slipping servers into VCE's cabinets. ®