Cisco/EMC: The Next Big Deal?

Could a marriage between Cisco and EMC be in the works? It's just an interesting idea -- there is no juicy rumor or speculation swirling around the industry -- but Yahoo!'s tech ticker is offering up the possibility as perhaps the next big deal in IT. It seems to make a lot of sense...

It's no secret that Cisco wants to be more of an IT player than just a provider of network infrastructure to the data center. Its $150 million stake in virtualization software developer VMware underscores that. Cisco is also a leading supplier of storage area network switches to enterprises.

EMC is the leading pure storage vendor for enterprise data centers. And EMC owns 86% of VMware, worth about $22 billion.

Yahoo! values a possible deal at $45 billion. Cisco has at least half of that in cash. After what looks like a successful digestion of Scientific-Atlanta -- and with stock prices as low as they are -- it might be time for Cisco to reel in a really big fish.

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