SAN FRANCISCO — Two years ago, Michael S. Dell succeeded in taking the company that bears his name private, giving him time and flexibility to adapt it to a rapidly changing technology industry.
Now Dell is poised to strike the biggest-ever takeover in the technology industry by buying a fellow company grappling with swift changes: the storage provider EMC.
In striking its roughly $65 billion deal, which is expected to be announced as soon as Monday, Dell and its financial backer, the investment firm Silver Lake, are betting that a huge acquisition will help one of the best-known names in the industry keep up with the times.
No longer can a company like Dell thrive simply by making personal computers, the business that its founder began in his dorm room three decades ago. Mr. Dell recognized that when he and Silver Lake took the company private two years ago, with the goal of continuing to move toward corporate computing services away from the glare of the public stock markets.
Buying EMC would give Dell one of the biggest names in computer data storage, adding to existing offerings like network servers, corporate software and mobile devices.
“We’re continuing to evolve the company into the most relevant areas where I.T. is moving,” Mr. Dell said in an interview. “This deal just accelerates that.”
Under the terms of the deal, Dell will pay the equivalent of $33.15 a share in a complicated transaction involving both cash and a special kind of stock. That price is about 27 percent higher from where EMC’s shares were trading before news of the deal first emerged.
The takeover is an ambitious bet on a number of fronts. While the rapid pace of big mergers and acquisitions has not stopped, Dell, in buying EMC, would acquire a huge amount of debt. But that money would be borrowed before an expected rise in interest rates.
And it would mean making Dell even bigger at a time when companies of all stripes believe smaller is better. Many huge tech companies have announced plans to break themselves into their components, each devoted to a particular part of the market.
Moving away from the conglomerate model, proponents contend, means that each business will have greater focus from both management and from shareholders, hopefully resulting in a higher stock price for the new companies.
Tech companies have been no exception. Hewlett-Packard, for instance, is close to completing a split of its enterprise-services business from its personal computer arm. EBay spun off its PayPal payments business from its core e-commerce market division earlier this year.
EMC itself has been criticized by investors for its so-called “federation,” a collection of businesses that range from data storage to networking to content management, though its management has largely rebuffed calls for a total breakup of the company.
Yet Mr. Dell and his counterpart at EMC, Joe Tucci, argue that sticking with the one-stop-shop business model would help it draw corporate customers eager to buy servers.
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