Dell, EMC customers love the pending merger

An overwhelming number of EMC and Dell customers surveyed like the idea of a merger between the companies, according to research analysts Enterprise Strategy Group.

ESG surveyed about 200 senior tech professionals working for mid-sized companies (100-999 employees - 32% of respondents) and large enterprises (1,000 or more employees - 68% of respondents) and discovered:

• 75% thought that a Dell/EMC combination would benefit their companies.
• 60% of respondents would increase their spending (with 32% saying they would spend about the same) with the combined company.

Most of them (65%) said they liked the idea because they thought the combined company would create better technology for them, a more complete catalog for their data center needs, if you will.

Half of the people who are already joint customers, said they liked the idea of having one less vendor to deal with. And slightly more than half (55%) said they think Dell, with its emphasis on affordable tech, would teach EMC, with its history of pricier tech, how to lower costs. Customers always like the idea of saving money.

There's still a good chance that the $67 billion deal will fall through. It's all predicated on some complicated financing that could fail to work out as planned.

And of course, how these customers will feel after the deal closes and these two enormous companies have to stitch themselves together remains to be seen.

Competitor Meg Whitman, CEO of the newly launched Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is banking on those rough patches. In an email to her employees, after the deal was announced she told them:

... integrating EMC and Dell, which combined have more than $75 billion in revenue and nearly 200,000 employees, is no small feat. This will be a massive undertaking and an enormous distraction for employees and their management team as two very different cultures come together, leadership teams shift and an entirely new strategy is developed.

In fact, the biggest worry these customers have over the deal is distracted management. 42% named that as a concern. But for now, this survey offers reason to believe that the most important people, the customers, are basically on board.