Report: Pat Gelsinger Says No Interest In VMware's Acquiring EMC

VMware has no interest in acquiring EMC, according to a report out of Israel based on a conversation with VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.

As originally reported by Seeking Alpha, Gelsinger said in a recent meeting with Cabalist, a daily Israel-based business publication, that VMware has no intention of acquiring EMC.

The news follows a report last week by Re/code that VMware is contemplating a downstream merger with EMC. In such a downstream merger, VMware would acquire parent company EMC.

The idea of a possible downstream merger between the two followed by two days another Re/code report that EMC is considering an acquisition of VMware.

Storage king EMC, which owns about 80 percent of VMware, is under pressure from investors to break up its EMC Federation, which includes EMC Information Infrastructure, VMware, Pivotal, RSA and VCE.

EMC is also reportedly a potential acquisition target of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the enterprise portion of Hewlett-Packard after that company splits in two this fall.

In the Calcalist report, which was written in Hebrew, Gelsinger told the business publication that VMware is a software company and EMC is a hardware company, and VMware has no plans to acquire EMC in part because it would not want to take on the additional operating costs that such a deal would bring.

Gelsinger also said the EMC and VMware businesses complement each other.

According to Calcalist, Gelsinger said he has had opportunities to work in other large companies, but declined to do so because he enjoys working with VMware.

The Calcalist report does not state when the publication spoke with Gelsinger. A VMware spokesperson said the company is looking for details about Gelsinger's meeting with Calcalist, but by publication time had not yet provided additional comment.

Gelsinger indeed does seem to prefer working with VMware, said Jamie Shepard, regional and health systems senior vice president at Lumenate, a Dallas-based solution provider and longtime partner to both companies.

Gelsinger in 2010 was heir-apparent to former Intel CEO Paul Otellini when he was hired as a vice president and chief operating officer for EMC's information infrastructure products.

Shepard told CRN that Gelsinger was hired because of his relationship with Intel. "EMC saw Intel as a catalyst to an increasingly software-defined world," he said.

Gelsinger as head of VMware is continuing to invest in the software-defined world, and for that reason would likely not want to take over EMC, Shepard said.

"From the channel perspective, putting VMware in charge of EMC would completely change everything," he said. "VMware doesn't care about storage hardware. It's selling efficiency solutions, cloud solutions, management solutions. They last thing it would want to do is sell storage hardware solutions."

PUBLISHED AUG. 8, 2015