The Alternatives: Sale To Or Merge With Oracle

Little has been said about how deep any conversations between EMC and Oracle on a possible merger or acquisition went.

Oracle's focus on middleware and on engineered systems is different from EMC's product strategy. While little product overlap is a good thing in a merger or acquisition, the two companies have such divergent strategies as to make a deal hard to integrate.

However, if any company can successfully acquire another with a totally different product strategy, Oracle is the one to do it as it showed with its 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Even so, there are few indications that Oracle is inclined to try again with EMC.