Software Defined Partnership

The big ones eat the little ones. The fast ones overtake the slow ones. None of this has been true for a long time. In times of start-ups and venture capital, a global economy that obviously has too much capital, mega-mergers and castles in the air are not uncommon.

But even if Dell's attempt to take over the EMC Group including VMware for almost 60 billion euros is an absolute top event of unprecedented magnitude in the IT community, there are more spectacular acquisitions in the real world, such as the merger of the breweries Anheuser-Busch and SABMiller for almost 100 billion euros.

Tactically and strategically, it is a good decision by Dell - or the only sensible one in the current situation. However, it is doubtful whether Dell will also be able to digest an EMC operationally.

Dell CEO and company founder Michael Dell may be an outstanding manager, but the rest of the team has not yet stood out or proven to be autonomous and far-sighted. However, Michael Dell will hardly be able to manage this takeover as a one-man show.

Help from EMC? This option is also unlikely, as EMC is considered unapproachable and stubborn. It is to be expected that EMC will block and sit back instead of helping with the merger.

EMC was once a proud and successful company, but times have changed: Storage hardware has lost its value since the concept of Software Defined Storage, Networking and Datacenter is already possible with open source software.

Which storage is located where is becoming increasingly irrelevant in cloud computing. Not that you need less storage today than you did last year, but the software makes it possible to mix and match and remove the hardware shackles. EMC's high-price policy acts like poison here.

Michael Dell has correctly recognized the trend: The hunger for storage, both on-premise and on-demand (cloud), will not be satisfied in the near future. However, many companies are hoping for substantial profits in the future and most of EMC's competitors are smaller and more flexible - a very important characteristic in the cloud business. The direction is right for Dell, but the practical implementation may hold surprises.