Neither Cisco Nor Oracle Want EMC

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Cisco CEO John Chambers

Flickr/Cisco

Cisco CEO John Chambers

Cisco has no interest in buying EMC despite rumors to the contrary, CEO John Chambers says.

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Cisco's name had been floated around as a possible suitor after talks of a mega-merger between EMC and HP ground to halt, as reported by the WSJ earlier this week.

"If Joe and I were going to do something here we would have done it a year or two ago," Chambers told people gathered for a breakfast Wednesday hosted by The Wall Street Journal. He was referring to EMC CEO Joe Tucci.

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That's not really surprising, though it would have been interesting if Cisco bought EMC. Although Cisco and EMC are close partners, EMCs subsidiary, VMware, has been threatening Cisco with a new technology called "software-defined networking," a new way to build networks using software and cheaper hardware.

But Cisco is now in full competition mode with VMware. It spent about $1 billion to build a competing product, launched in December, and Chambers vowed to crush VMware's fledgling networking business and steal away all of its customers.

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Oracle's name was also floated as a possible buyer, but the company isn't interested, sources told Re/code. That's not at all surprising either. Oracle has been struggling for years to digest the last sprawling hardware company it bought, Sun Microsystems.

Oracle is now focused on building a cloud business. So buying the world's biggest maker of storage hardware doesn't fit into that, even if it that purchase did include VMware, a significant player in the cloud world.

HP reportedly wanted EMC mostly to lay its hands on VMware, and wanted to pay market price for EMC. But EMC wanted a premium price and the talks broke down from there, Re/code's Arik Hesseldahl reports.

The deal between HP and EMC isn't completely dead, sources told Barron's. But we'll see.