Pressure from investors led by Elliott Management have the IT industry looking at multiple ways EMC could more quickly build shareholder value. Ideas range from doing nothing to radical business changes.

French solution provider Atos is preparing to host the IT infrastructure of the 2016 Games in its Canopy cloud.

Storage vendor Nimble Storage has partially based its latest SmartStack for ROBO Desktop Virtualization converged infrastructure solution on the new Cisco UCS Mini servers introduced last month.

The end of the merger discussions was brought home forcefully by HP's disclosure Wednesday that it is no longer in possession of material nonpublic information.

EMC aims to make it easy to help customers move between private and public clouds by acquiring Cloudscaling, which offers OpenStack-based technology that connects IaaS solutions to Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Platform.

Following the new Federation Software-Defined Data Center, the EMC Federation of companies plan to pool resources to develop PaaS, virtual data lake, end-user computing and security analytics solutions.

Partners realize they aren't simply being asked to adapt, they've got to utterly transform.

EMC responded to an open letter from Elliott Management urging the storage vendor to split with VMware and get itself sold.

Cisco Systems, which owns 35 percent of the VCE data center stack joint venture, is mulling an end to further financial investment, and EMC may bring VCE in-house, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Now that HP has formally said it plans to break off into two companies, the enterprise HP could be more attractive than legacy HP for a merger or acquisition with EMC.

EMC tapped former Apple sales exec Zane Rowe to be CFO, following other recent executive changes, in a bid to become more than another legacy storage vendor.

Larry Ellison told attendees at Oracle OpenWorld that his company provides the only way to automatically move data between on-premise and the cloud while automatically modernizing applications for social, mobile, analytics and security capabilities.

Speculation over whether EMC will be acquired by or merge with a systems vendor or other IT entity, or whether it will sell its stake in VMware, has the IT industry buzzing.

Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers told the Wall Street Journal that if Cisco wanted a merger with or to buy EMC, it would have done so before now.

Should EMC give in to investor pressure to merge with or be acquired by a system vendor, the resulting clash in corporate cultures could complicate the integration process.

The high valuation of EMC's stake in VMware in proportion to EMC's overall market capitalization and earnings suggests EMC has to explore all options.

A potential merger of equals between storage giant EMC and HP would make a lot more sense than a mega-deal with Dell, according to investors and financial analysts.

The discussions between HP and EMC, which included a potential HP PC and printing business spin-off, are no longer ongoing, according to a report from CNBC.

Solution providers commenting on a Wall Street Journal report that storage giant EMC has held talks with HP and Dell said they would welcome an EMC merger with one of the enterprise data center infrastructure powers.

The falling price of cloud storage helps with customer conversations, say solution providers, as it either opens the door to prospective new business or keeps a relationship going with the addition of new services.