The Alternatives: Status Quo

EMC for now appears to be executing its strategy of doing nothing drastic in response to investor calls for change.

Talks between EMC and HP seem to be over for now, and that is likely the case in discussions with other vendors. The status quo gives EMC the opportunity to continue developing new technologies for modern data centers while taking advantage of its huge-if-not-growing storage business.

It's easy to overlook the fact that EMC, in combination with VMware, has one of the most complete cloud and software-defined technology portfolios, including software-defined data center, storage, and networking capabilities. And despite its large storage hardware base, EMC could quickly turn around and go all software-defined storage faster than anyone.