By Graham K. Rogers

News just announced concerns discussions about a merger of some sort between EMC Corporation, a major player in cloud technology and solutions, valued at something near $50 billion and Dell, the computer maker.

While Dell has an obvious presence in the home and office environment, it also has a considerable stake in enterprise computing, so the combination of these two would seem to create and end to end solution that would be attractive for many businesses.

The main product areas that EMC advertises are storage, cloud, big data, data protection, security, content management and converged infrastructure.

According to a report on Wall Street Journal, the talks currently taking place also includes private-equity firm Silver Lake. Some sources reported shares of EMC rose some 7.8% in pre-market trading. An AP report (on CNBC) suggested the most likely scenario is EMC buying Dell or a merger between the two businesses.

James Kisner of Jefferies suggests that the new combination would "be able to better compete against companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft." Note also that other companies are significantly concerned with cloud and enterprise solutions, including Apple and IBM.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. He is now continuing that in the Bangkok Post supplement, Life.