EMC Corp. has reportedly denied that it plans to offload its stake in VMware Inc., just hours after rumors of an impending sale re-emerged via the New York Post.

Whispers of this news have been bubbling just under the surface for several weeks now, ever since activist investor Elliot Management picked up a sizeable stake in EMC last June. Shortly after that development, someone somewhere leaked something to the Wall Street Journal, which reported that Elliot Management’s plan was to engineer a sell-off of VMware to line its investor’s pockets.

EMC has since acknowledged it has a duty to engage with its shareholders and work with them to improve their prospects. But EMC seems to think it doesn’t need to bend over backwards for them, as it keeps re-iterating its belief that it’s “Federation” idea is the best way forward.

The past couple of weeks were pretty quiet, but on Thursday the New York Post suddenly announced EMC has “decided to explore selling its stake in VMware”.

A few hours later, Re/Code reported the New York Post’s story was junk, quoting an unnamed source. This story was quickly followed by a similar debunking from Reuters.

It’s impossible to say how much truth there is to these rumors of a sale, but if it did happen it’s unlikely to benefit either company in the long-term now that they’re so reliant upon each other. VMware needs EMC’s ViPR if it’s to fulfill its software-defined data center (SDDC) ambitions, while EMC needs VMware’s SDDC plans to succeed if its to sell ViPR and XtremIO against competition from rivals IBM corp. and Hewlett-Packard Company. Any sale might make the shareholders a quick profit, but it would also complicate the plans of both companies going forward.

Of course, none of these rumors can actually be substantiated so far, no one has been willing to put their name to the “facts”.

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