Welcome!

Cloud Expo Authors: Pat Romanski, Maureen O'Gara, Elizabeth White, Adrian Bridgwater, Jeremy Geelan

Related Topics: .NET, SOA & WOA, Virtualization, Silverlight, Cloud Expo, Big Data Journal, SDN Journal

.NET: Article

Microsoft May Help Take Dell Private

It could kick in somewhere between $1 billion and $3 billion

Microsoft is in talks to help Dell finance a buyout, according to both CNBC and the Wall Street Journal.

It could kick in somewhere between $1 billion and $3 billion.

The rumored price to take Dell private remains around $13-$14 a share.

Private equity house Silver Lake Partners has reportedly been talking to banks as well as pension and sovereign wealth funds to arrange an estimated $15 billion in financing.

Microsoft, which has more than $66.6 billion in the bank, has recently started making its own tablets, but the only PC company it ever threw a lifeline to before was Apple.

The move may irritate other PC vendors. Obviously Microsoft may feel that it needs Dell to sell its software although Dell's PC revenue is declining.

CNBC, which broke the news, said Microsoft might invest in mezzanine financing that takes the form of preferred securities that convert into equity down the road.

According to CNBC's David Faber, "It doesn't mean that Microsoft will end up with a significant equity stake in what is a private Dell but it certainly has a lot at stake to make sure that the company does well because of course it sells an awful lot of software into those computers."

Faber thinks there could be an announcement by the end of the week if they can agree on a price.

The Journal said Microsoft may be able to use offshore money without triggering repatriation taxes if its investment in Dell is less than 25%. Any gains would have to be kept overseas. Microsoft has $58 billion overseas and has been looking for investments with better yields than US government bonds.

Microsoft bought Skype from Silver Lake for $8.5 billion in 2011 and committed $695 million to Barnes and Noble's Android-based Nook business last year including a deal to make an e-reader with Windows software.

Then there's its multibillion-dollar partnership with Nokia, which is using Windows for its struggling smartphones and its $240 million investment in Facebook, which is using some of Microsoft's search.

Microsoft teamed with Silver Lake in a failed attempt to acquire Yahoo.

A Dell buyout, as practically everyone has previously remarked, would be the biggest leveraged buyout since 2008 when credit collapsed.

More Stories By Maureen O'Gara

Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.


Cloud Expo Breaking News
At pennies per virtual machine-hour, the economics of cloud computing are both compelling and daunting to replicate. Whether you are building your own cloud infrastructure, building a public cloud or choosing a cloud service, there are key strategy and technology decisions that make the difference between success and failure. In his General Session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Jason Waxman, VP in the Intel Architecture Group and general manager of the Cloud Platforms Group within Inte...
You're getting pitched every day from your legacy enterprise software and hardware vendors about "cloud." They're doing an amazing job of convincing your CIO and CTO about what cloud is and how you should use it. The reality is they're defending their shrinking market share and keeping you on the legacy treadmill for as long as they can by selling you solutions that aren't "cloud." In her session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Niki Acosta, Cloud Evangelista for Rackspace, will talk thro...
The rise of cloud computing has exposed hard drive-based storage as the new data center bottleneck. Combating this, data center managers have deployed SSDs to gain the performance needed to provide real-time access to data. However, due to budget constraints, many have turned to consumer-grade SSDs without understanding that they wear out quickly when processing enterprise workloads. In this session, Esther Spanjer will discuss recent endurance advancements in SSD technology that enable usage of...
SYS-CON Events announced today that Wowrack will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. Wowrack’s core expertise lies in high-availability Private and Public Cloud IaaS Hosting Solutions. Wowrack provides a true Hybrid service – where business release all IT management and hardware provisioning – taking the data center and server system administrative headaches off our customer’s shoulders. ...
Organizations across the world are increasingly starting to see the benefits of moving more and more services to the cloud. The focus on the cost-saving potential of cloud is rapidly shifting to completely transforming the business with cloud. As organizations are investing enormous sums on technology they are starting to realize that in order to maximize the return on investment and accelerate the business transformation process the first area of focus should be people. By ensuring the organiza...
"Since Cloud Expo is running the week of June 10, we thought it'd be a great idea to schedule our Meetup this week. That way, if you have colleagues, friends, or family in town that week for the Expo, you can invite them to join you!" With those words, the OpenStack New York Meetup Group's organizer's launched a landing page this week where anyone interested can register for the June 12 evening event.
Organizations want extraordinary results from their IT units. Today's mantra is faster delivery, better quality, cheaper solutions, and safer environments. Many CIOs are implementing cloud computing enterprise architectures to address these challenges with results varying greatly. Why are some organizations seeing only limited results from cloud computing implementations while others are increasing market share, decreasing costs, generating value, and innovating faster?
Everyone is virtualizing, but are they realizing any of the promised savings? This overview of IBM's new virtualization optimization solutions will show you how integrated Cloud Solutions like SmartCloud Provisioning and SmartCloud Monitoring can deliver the savings virtualization promises. Organizations are using intelligent management and analytics to provide the insight needed to optimize their virtualized infrastructure and dramatically improve availability, reduce data storage footprint...
“Big Data analytics will shape the form of nearly every process going forward in time, from the color of the latest fashions, what the candidates say in one town versus another to the chemical composition of the latest super drug,” noted Steve Knodl, Director of Product Management at NextIO, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “Whether these are considered “new” products,” Knodl continued, “or continuous improvement on previous processes is largely in the eyes o...
In an ideal developer/systems administrator’s world, most applications would deploy seamlessly to multiple platforms and scale elastically with minimal effort bringing the unprecedented agility of the cloud within immediate reach of developer teams and IT organizations. OpenStack, a RackSpace and NASA initiative, is now managed by an independent foundation and is supported by multiple vendors. It defines APIs for compute, storage, networking, services, monitoring, and additional infrastructure...