Merging HP and EMC – hold on, wait, hear us out. The cap is still on the bottle of crazy pills

Looking at the possibilities

Who would go where, and what will be paired with hot topics like HP's Autonomy?

Organizationally, HP Storage could be assigned to EMC II. Vertica could go to Pivotal. Enterprise Services could become the overall EMC Services arm and remain in a Meg Whitman-run HP business that becomes part of the EMC federation. Documentum and allied products could be assigned to HP's Autonomy unit, thus freeing David Goulden, EMC II CEO, of what he might view as a boat anchor.

Helion, HP's cloud business, could remain in HP.

The troublesome and historically unsatisfactory HP board could simply be paid off, with Meg Whitman joining EMC's board and her big thing, the division of HP into two businesses, being nicely rounded off.

Elliott Management would, hopefully, see its shares rise in value, sell them off for cash, and move on to the next target. EMC's board would probably break into song if Paul Singer's crew vacated the premises.

Potential goodness

From a sales point of view, bringing EMC products to HP customers, and HP products to EMC customers, ought to give both sales forces advantages, resulting in a bigger share of customer IT spend. This includes direct sales and channel partners.

There would be opportunities for substantial rationalization, job losses, and cost savings, in back-office functions, sales, and engineering, with millions of dollars of costs being taken out.

An HP-EMC combination would enable EMC to compete on an equal or more than equal footing with Dell and IBM. Both EMC and HP would be better positioned to compete with the looming giant that is Hitachi. That company has the ability to combine HDS storage with Hitachi's overall infrastructure equipment business to form a giant Internet of Things (IoT) data-generating and analyzing colossus.

In fact, we could go further and say that, with the IoT trend and its potential growth, the days of the overall standalone IT supplier are coming to an end, but that may be too fanciful a thought.

HP and EMC would stop competing with each other. With HP networking coming to EMC, competition with Cisco for networking spend would start to become possible. Customers could get a truly converged offering from HP-EMC, encompassing services, servers, networking, storage, security, virtual servers, cloud, and analytics software.

This would be a broader product offering than Dell's, and rival if not surpass IBM's, lacking only the niche mainframe business.

We asked HP about merger talks with EMC. A spokesperson said: "As a matter of company policy, HP does not comment on rumor and speculation."

We also asked EMC II's Jeremy Burton, president of products and marketing, and he said he had no comment either, other than a slight laugh.

An EMC-HP merger makes sense on the back of El Reg's envelope; lots of sense, in fact. That doesn't matter a bean, though. It has to make sense to the CEOs, execs, and senior beancounters in EMC and HP's headquarters. ®