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The ink was barely dry on Dell’s acquisition of EMC, the largest technology deal ever, valued at $67 billion when it was announced in October last year – and already the layoff rumors are oozing from the woodwork.snip But Dell needs to save some money, one way or the other. Dell’s corporate credit rating is at the upper end of junk. It’s loaded to the gills with debt, stemming from when it was taken private. Now the EMC deal has piled new debt on the company, including $20 billion of bonds it sold in May, followed by a $5-billion leveraged...

EMC Insurance is a firm that began a century ago as Employers Mutual Casualty Association of Iowa. Its products are sold in forty states and it claims to be one of the sixty largest insurance companies in America. And now it thinks it can defy an interest group that does not like to be disrespected: A new Kansas law allowing gun owners to carry weapons in public buildings, including schools, has thrust a major Des Moines-based insurer into the national gun control debate. The EMC Insurance Cos. insures 85 percent to 90 percent of all Kansas school districts and...

CPTN Holdings LLC (acquirer of 882 Novell patents): Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle are the partners according to German antitrust notification Breaking news: Twitter user @VM_gville (whose account has meanwhile disappeared) pointed me to the website of the German federal antitrust authority ("Bundeskartellamt"), which discloses a merger (or more precisely, joint venture) notification filed a week ago (on 09 December 2010), according to which the four companies behind CPTN Holdings LLC -- the acquirer of 882 Novell patents -- are Microsoft, Apple, EMC, and Oracle. The product market in which the newly formed company plans to operate is defined as...

Imagine a young woman riding the subway, consumed by her thoughts: she is pregnant, considering abortion, but unsure of where to turn. She looks up midcommute and notices a sign with three bold words, one beneath the other: “Free abortion alternatives.” At the bottom of the sign are several phone numbers that will lead her to any one of 12 E.M.C. FrontLine Pregnancy Centers around New York City. The centers — crisis pregnancy centers — provide support for women who would like to continue their pregnancies but are in dire financial straits. They provide useful social service referrals and offer...

Richard Egan, the billionaire co-founder of EMC Corp. and the former U.S. ambassador to Ireland, died today of a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head, police and other sources confirmed. Egan, 73, a resident of the Four Seasons condominiums on Boylston Street, had been battling terminal cancer, sources said. He had a visiting nurse attending to him while he underwent treatments. Both the nurse and his wife were in the condominium this afternoon when Egan died at home, sources told the Herald.

Intel Corp., the world's largest chip maker, will invest $218.5 million in virtualization software maker VMware Inc., the companies announced Monday. The investment will give Intel ownership of about 2.5 percent of VMware's outstanding shares after VMware completes its initial public offering. An Intel executive also will join VMware's board of directors. The deal underscores the growing importance of so-called virtualization software, which allows companies to run more than one operating system on individual computers, in turn boosting the productivity of those machines and cutting overhead costs. Intel and VMware said they will continue to jointly develop and market products,...

Look like EMC has VMware's upcoming IPO penciled in for late June and that the S1 registration papers should start circulating soon. EMC said in February that it would float 10% of the subsidiary, which could be valued at $10 billion.

EMC's top salesman Dave DeWalt has left the storage giant to saddle up as CEO and president of security firm McAfee DeWalt joined EMC in 2003 when it bought his last CEO charge Documentum in 2003. After a management reshuffle last summer, some analysts put him in the race to succeed current EMC CEO Joe Tucci. DeWalt's responsibilities as EMC's executive VP and president of customer operations and content management and archive fall to current vice chairman Bill Teuber. DeWalt, 42, will take over from McAfee's interim boss Dale Fuller on April 2, who will serve as an advisor to...

EMC, which is perhaps best known for its disk arrays and some of the software it has acquired in the past few years, such as VMware for server and workstation virtualization, Legato Systems for tape backups, and Documentum for information lifecycle management, is a bit frustrated that Wall Street doesn't correctly value EMC's portfolio of products. And so, it is selling of a 10 percent stake in VMware, perhaps its hottest item, in an initial public offering. In 2006, the VMware unit had $709 million in sales, up 83 percent, and with the launch of the Infrastructure 3 product set,...

A New York-based crisis pregnancy center operator is suing one of the most aggressively marketed abortion providers in New York City for alleged false advertising. Expectant Mother Care, which has twice been cleared of false advertising charges made by abortion supporters, claims the "Dr. Emily" abortion clinics are illegally advertising in the "abortion alternatives" section of local telephone directories in violation of state law. "The consumer cannot help but be deceived and misled by the blatant falsehood," Chris Slattery, founder of Expectant Mother Care (EMC) told Cybercast News Service in an exclusive interview Friday. Slattery filed suit in New York...

Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (BRCD) said on Tuesday it would buy rival McData Corp. (MCDT) in a $713 million stock deal, bolstering its line of equipment for data storage networks to compete against Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO). Both companies sell equipment that boosts the efficiency of corporate communications networks used for data storage, with Brocade best known for mid-range products known as data switches, while McData's market share is strongest in directors, which are high-end versions of data switches. "It's made sense for them to come together to take on Cisco for a long time," said Glenn Hanus, an analyst...

In what is being described as one of its biggest and most strategic acquisitions ever, HP has agreed to pay US$4.5 billion for applications management software vendor Mercury Interactive. HP had previously been in a hotly contested bidding war for the company with storage vendor EMC. The move comes with a few major risks. It is HP's biggest ever move into the software space, where well-established software players, such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft are already competing. The integration of Mercury into HP's business will be another mammoth project, like Compaq four years earlier. Finally, Mercury is involved in a...

VMware has armed its largest product release in company history. The server virtualization specialist looks to extend its lead over Microsoft and a host of other rivals with a revamp to its flagship product and a number of upgraded and new management packages. Beyond the product refreshes, VMware has also altered the way it sells software by picking up a more aggressive bundling model. All told, VMware is well poised to burrow deeper into customers' data centers. Starting today, customers will find the EMC subsidiary selling VMware Infrastructure 3. At its broadest level, this package includes the new ESX Server...

Into the Valley Anyone gullible enough to believe vendor press releases would wonder why Cassatt even exists. It's a software start-up trying to compete in a server virtualization market dominated by the likes of IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems. And, in fact, these massive companies have already solved the virtualization problem, according to the last three years of their marketing material. Customers actually trying to improve their data center management situation don't buy this hype. They've watched HP kill off the Utility Data Center project after billing it as the clear future of computing. They've also seen Sun Microsystems do...

EMC Corp. said Friday it plans to eliminate 1,000 positions but added that it will see a net gain in total employment by year's end as the company moves to emphasize data services and software amid pressure to cut costs in the data storage hardware business. EMC, whose shares fell about 2 percent Friday, announced the cuts affecting about 4 percent of its work force as it raised its fourth-quarter revenue estimate. The company also said a total $269 million in charges from the job moves and other expenses will reduce its quarterly and full-year 2005 earnings, to be announced...

Global revenue for standalone storage systems grew 8.6 percent year over year to reach $3.8 billion in the second quarter, according to market researcher IDC. This growth, an improvement over the first quarter, was mainly due to double-digit growth in network attached storage, or NAS, systems, IDC said Friday. This segment grew 16.1 percent to $2.5 billion. EMC, with $807 million in revenue, retained its position as the top standalone storage systems company. EMC also grew its market share to 21.2 percent from 21 percent a year ago. But the credit for the strongest growth in the quarter went to...

Applera Corp., one of Hewlett Packard Co.'s showcase clients, has decided to retool its IT infrastructure, upgrading and consolidating its server infrastructure and networked storage by swapping out all its Compaq equipment for IBM servers and EMC storage. The deal, likely worth tens of millions of dollars, involves more than 150TB of EMC high-end storage and a dozen of IBM's high-end P-series servers configured in a super computer cluster. Mark Lewis, who took over as EMC Corp.'s chief technology officer in July after resigning as vice president and general manager of Compaq's Enterprise Storage Group, led the development of Compaq's...