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An Oracle bid to acquire storage vendor EMC remains a rumor for now, but the possibility is being taken seriously by Wall Street, where investors drove EMC share prices up more than 4 percent Thursday.
Oracle has been rumored for some time to be interested in acquiring a storage vendor in the wake of its January acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Sun brought Oracle a strong server technology but a weak storage business despite its preacquisition introduction of the widely acclaimed Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems, also known as Amber Road.
The acquisition of EMC, combined with the hardware-software stack being built using Oracle software and middleware and Sun hardware, would give Oracle a healthy bump in its data center presence and make its combined hardware-software stack a more formidable competitor in the converged infrastructure market, which is currently dominated by Hewlett-Packard's Matrix and Cisco's Unified Computing System.
Converged infrastructure refers to tying server, storage and IP networking into an integrated solution in order to give customers a single vendor source for building data centers that can be used for a variety of applications including services and cloud computing.
Such an acquisition also would give Oracle control of VMware, enabling it to go head-to-head against Microsoft in the virtualization and operating system markets. It also would give Oracle a big presence in the security market, thanks to EMC's RSA offering.
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