Oracle buys EMC?

Stocks of EMC, one of market leaders of storage systems, sharply went up on Thursday after on the market rumors about her potential buyer – Oracle filtered. Growth of the stock of the company was 4.88% in a day, biddings on Thursday were closed on the record price in $21.83 for the first time in 52 weeks. Stocks of Oracle, on the contrary, lost more than 1%.

The analyst of Wedbush Kaushik Roy says that rumors about the possible transaction literally excited the market: its phone was broken off from calls of clients and traders, each of which of different sources obtained information on the future purchase. Oracle and EMC refused to comment on rumors officially.

Roy called such purchase from Oracle "the bad idea" and estimated transaction probability at 25%. According to him, EMC could cost Ellison $50 billion that requires a large sum of cash. "Though Larry Ellison is rather mad to make any unpredictable act, I believe that it at first needs to digest Sun before taking such aggressive step on the market of storage-systems and virtualization", - the expert added. Let's remind that the deal on purchase of Oracle of the producer of servers of SUN Microsystems was completely closed quite recently.

Data storage became one of key areas of IT market in connection with the expanding corporate data centers, also as well as the virtualization allowing to manage more effectively resources of servers. In this plan of EMC, having competence of both of these areas, certainly, a valuable strategic asset. Let's remind, it owns also 80% of stocks of VMware. Growth of the importance of technology of data storage already forced one large vendor, HP, to purchase company 3Par for $2.35 billion, and IBM was succeeded to change Dell and to purchase business of Netezza for $1.7 billion.

For EMC Ellison can not have enough money though in the market there is anything. Oracle has market capitalization in $143.8 billion, the company also has $12 billion cash and $11.6 billion more in liquid securities. Also the company has $17 billion long-term debts, so in fact the company will have only $6.6 billion real means less $5.4 billion for Sun purchase.

One of probable scenarios of succession of events market observers call not absorption, but merge of two companies as for this purpose astronomical financial resources are not required for Ellison. However, to be necessary to mean that Ellison is one of the largest shareholders of Oracle and if the companies to integrate, he should separate influence with the current CEO and the president of EMC Joe Tucci. Not clearly whether it is ready to go to it. According to Roy, with a bigger share of probability of Oracle can purchase NetApp or Brocade, and EMC of the company "too hard" so far.