"Dell is taking a slightly different approach," Nat Burgess of Corum Group, suggesting that picking up the stake in VMware could make the company into a power in the cloud.
"VMware is the only one who can challenge Microsoft in the corporate cloud and keep Google and Amazon at bay," he said. "Rather than packaging hardware for sale in a market that won't place a high value on it, they are making a software acquisition that long term can lift the hardware business."