It took about 12 minutes on Tuesday morning for EMC (EMC) shareholders to approve Dell’s proposed merger with EMC.
Among the preliminary numbers from EMC’s special shareholders meeting Tuesday morning, 98% of votes were cast in favor of the deal, representing 74% of outstanding shares. Approximately 94% of shareholders voted to approve the compensation plan for EMC executives, and then the meeting was adjourned. Final numbers will be posted on EMC’s investor web site when tallied.
Read more: Here’s what still bugs some people about Dell-EMC deal
The deal was worth an estimated $67 billion when it was announced in October—that value has since fallen to $62 billion. When it was previewed, all parties expected the merger to be finalized within a year—and so it has been.
The new entity, privately held Dell Technologies, will meld Dell’s server, PC, and storage units with EMC’s storage business as well as RSAs security products, VirtuStream’s enterprise cloud unit, and VMware’s data center software and virtualization businesses.
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The newly-combined company will compete with other big-but-stressed IT giants, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Oracle (ORCL), and IBM (IBM)—all of which have been challenged by a change in the way corporate customers are buying technology.
The migration to shared public cloud computing means companies that once bought thousands of new servers and storage boxes every few years are now putting more of their data and applications into data centers owned and operated by the likes of Amazon (AMZN) Web Services, Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG), and others.
While all these legacy IT giants formulated their own cloud strategies, it’s become apparent that the new guard of cloud providers are not necessarily buying the pricey name-brand gear made by the incumbent hardware makers.
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Tuesday’s meeting must have been a bittersweet moment for long-time EMC chief executive and chairman Joe Tucci, who will retire now with Michael Dell assuming the top spot at the combined company. EMC veteran David Goulden will be president of Dell EMC, the new company’s enterprise business.
Other key execs to watch going forward are VMware (VMW) chief executive Pat Gelsinger, Virtustream boss Rodney Rogers, and Pivotal chief executive Rob Mee.
This story was updated at 11:21 a.m. EDT to add David Goulden’s status at the new company.