Report: EMC Eyes Sale Of Documentum As Dell Merger Approaches

EMC is looking to sell its Documentum software unit in a move that parallels Dell's efforts to sell off assets ahead of the companies' pending merger, according to a Bloomberg report.

Initial reports indicated EMC had agreed to a Dell plan to shop the Documentum software business to prospective private equity buyers as part of an effort to offset the cost of acquiring EMC. However, a source close to the merger told CRN that "solely EMC" was considering the sale.

Spokesmen for Dell and EMC declined to comment.

Related: Dell Expands Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Prowess With New EMC, VMware, VCE Technology

Michael Thomaschewski, director of infrastructure at Canada-based EMC partner Long View Systems, said the sale would have relatively little impact on EMC's channel.

"Only a very small number of EMC partners sell Documentum," Thomaschewski said. "Most EMC partners are engaged at an infrastructure level, not at the application level with document management."

Documentum's software helps businesses track their corporate documents. EMC acquired the company in 2003 for about $1.7 billion.

Privately held Dell expects its acquisition of EMC to close between May and October. Since the deal was announced last October, Dell has made efforts to sell off assets in order to offset the cost of the transaction. The acquisition deal is worth around $60 billion. Dell intends to take on as much as $49.5 billion in debt in order to complete it.

CEO Michael Dell has said his company intends to spend the first 18 to 24 months following the closing aggressively paying down the debt it will take on in the acquisition.

In late March, Dell reached an agreement to sell its Perot Systems business to NTT Data of Japan for about $3.1 billion. The Round Rock, Tex., company is also shopping its SonicWall security business and its Quest software unit for a combined $4 billion.

Dell and EMC have also begun collaborating, most recently with an agreement for Dell to resell EMC hyper-converged infrastructure solutions, including VCE's VxRack and VxRail solutions, as well as VMware VSNAN Ready Node solutions. Dell also introduced a new reference architecture that combines Dell server and EMC storage technology.

In February, Dell began reselling EMC's bread-and-butter VMAX storage solutions, reviving a sales pact that ended in a messy divorce about seven years earlier.

Dell is a $55 billion company and does about 40 percent of its business through the channel. EMC, a $25 billion publicly traded company, does about 60 percent of its business through the channel. The acquisition is widely considered the largest in the tech industry history, and will create an $80 billion global IT superpower with strong positions in markets from low-cost PCs to high-end data center software and equipment.