The activist investor that’s been manipulating things behind the scenes at EMC Corp. has given the company until the end of this month to decide if it’ll give into its demands to sell off VMware Inc. as a way of maximizing shareholder value.

In what appears to be a leak from Elliott Management Inc. to the Reuters news agency, the activist firm said the extended deadline following the end of a standstill agreement will allow EMC to come up with an agreeable response to its demands. If not, the conflict could well escalate into a public battle for investor support, with Elliott looking to unseat certain, unnamed power brokers within EMC.

That’s not to say there’s anything to suggest EMC’s other investors would back Elliott though. EMC’s President and CEO Joe Tucci seems to be confident they’ll back him on this, at least if his consistent stance that the Federation would be better off by remaining intact is any indicator. Nevertheless, Elliott’s strategists insist the companies could deliver a better return on their investments by splitting up.

According to The Register, the main problem with the Federation (according to Elliott) is there’s no real technical collaboration between its members. Instead, Elliott believes the Federation only exists as a vehicle for financial engineering.

The Register speculates that if and when President Joe Tucci leaves EMC, there will be little to hold the Federation together because the current corporate structure prevents the component businesses from following a path that makes the most sense to them.

For example, Reuters says VMware seems to be a natural competitor to EMC II in the storage business. It also says EMC II needs to improve its product technology planning and coordination if it wants to be more competitive.

In recent weeks, EMC has been rocked by a number of top-level executive departures that have only added to suspicions there could be a big corporate shakeup in the works. But industry watcher Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told SiliconANGLE the executive departures were most likely “normal” events unrelated to the Elliott kerfuffle.

“Most of the changes are either tied to a divestiture or because of a better offer from the recruiting firms,” he said in August. “It [the Federation] stays as long as Tucci stays, and Tucci could well be around for much longer than some EMC watchers have suggested.”

In any case, Reuters says Elliott is happy to bide its time until EMC reports its third quarter earnings on October 21. Once that deadline passes though, we might well get an inkling of how this long-running saga is going to pan out.

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