EMC's board has begun the search for its next CEO as the company undertakes an $850 million cost-cutting program in the wake of yet another quarter of declining profits.

The startup in the red-hot hyper-converged infrastructure market has undergone a management shuffle aimed at getting it ready for a potential IPO, according to its CEO.

For the week ending July 10, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their 'A' game to the channel.

EMC's Bob Basiliere, senior director of global account marketing, tells CRN that when it comes to the channel and their customers, 'we have to get to a point where it's not 12 different scenarios we have to solve for, it's just a few and people can consume it and learn it.'

While Hewlett-Packard is widely believed to have talked with EMC about acquiring the storage vendor last year, the chances of such a deal happening this year are much higher, according to a couple of the IT industry's top financial analysts.

In other top stories from this week, Tami Duncan left her post at IBM. Also, VMware and Carahsoft settle a civil suit with the U.S. government.

EMC shareholders could receive a 25 percent premium with Hewlett-Packard stepping up to acquire the storage maker, according to a detailed financial analysis by investment bank Raymond James.

The huge investment provides Cisco with greater visibility and a stronger presence in China to better compete against Huawei and against telecom giant ZTE as well, say solution providers.

Jonathan Martin, a longtime storage marketing veteran, is moving into a newly created chief marketing officer role at the all-flash storage array vendor.

Donatelli, who left HP in March, now is managing Oracle's hardware business, including its engineered systems.

The acquisition brings Agile software development expertise in a wide range of areas to World Wide Technology's data center infrastructure integration practice.

The new pricing, in addition to the rollout of new 3Par StoreServ arrays, shows HP is not giving any ground to all-flash storage array startups.

After the apparently false rumor of a Nutanix acquisition, Cisco partners are wondering when the networking giant is going to unleash a hyper-converged infrastructure play in the growing HCI market.

Lenovo, which resells storage solutions from EMC and IBM, has unveiled a new line of enterprise storage solutions based on its own intellectual property.

NetApp told analysts that fourth-quarter 2015 sales and earnings took a big hit because of a slower-than-expected transition of customers to the company's new Clustered Data OnTap solutions, and that it will focus both direct and indirect sales on the transition.

EMC wants to tighten alignment between direct sales and the channel so partners and customers can deal with it seamlessly.

While EMC World is the annual event for storage kingpin EMC to showcase its technologies, a lot of non-EMC vendors take advantage of the conference to generate some buzz about how they also fit in EMC environments.

EMC says it is preparing not just for the future, but for the steps it'll take toward that future. Partners at EMC World said the company is making the right moves.

EMC CEO Joe Tucci expounded on a wide range of subjects at EMC World 2015, including the pressure from activist investor Elliott Management and the company's research and development.

The company's Federation strategy, tightly tying together the disparate offerings from EMC, VCE, VMware, RSA and Pivotal, is making EMC's channel stronger.