Amid Calls To Break Up, EMC Is Hosting A Special News Conference Thursday

EMC will be announcing its quarterly earnings Thursday and along with that, it is hosting a special press conference at 9:30 a.m. ET. We've just been invited to dial and listen.

EMC typically releases earnings before the opening bell. But its routine conference call with Wall Street analysts is scheduled for 8:30 a.m., so this press conference is something different. We understand the news will break at 8 a.m., likely with the earnings release.

We don't know what EMC will announce.

But we can speculate: maybe the company will announce that it is breaking up, splitting VMware off. Maybe it will also say that its longtime CEO Joe Tucci is retiring. As long as we're wildly guessing, we'll predict that Paul Maritz will become the CEO of the EMC piece, with Pat Gelsinger continuing to helm VMware.

Why are we guessing this?

EMC has been under pressure from investor Elliott Management, headed by Paul Singer, to spin off its hot-and-profitable subsidiary, VMware, and maybe its other subsidiaries, like security company RSA and big data cloud company Pivotal (currently run by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz).

EMC owns about 80% of VMware, a publicly traded enterprise software company valued at about $40 billion. According to Singer's analysis, when you back out the value of VMware and the other subsidiaries, the core EMC business is being given away to investors for free. This, even though EMC is one of the world's largest makers of computer storage.

But that core business is under pressure. Corporations are increasingly using the cloud to store their documents, instead of buying storage for their own data centers. And, when they do buy storage, there are a host of startups out there like Pure Storage, Nutanix, and Pernixdata eager to sell it to them.

Last month, news leaked that EMC was thinking about doing something big. HP was reportedly in talks to merge with EMC, but those talks ended when the two couldn't agree on price. HP consequently decided to split itself apart and that acquisition seems dead.

Plus, breakups are all the rage.

In the past few weeks, eBay, HP, and Symantec have decided to split. Valley super investor, Marc Andreessen, a board member for both eBay and HP, says more older conglomerate tech companies will do the same, so they can better compete with startups.

Again, we don't know what this news will be. We'll all find out in a few hours.