Taking a lead from Hewlett-Packard Co.’s CEO Meg Whitman, IBM chief Ginni Rometty has gone public with her own take on the Dell Inc./EMC Corp. mega-acquisition.

The Register reports that Rometty made her remarks at the Fortune Most Powerful Women event yesterday. Her comments come across as being mostly guarded, with the CEO saying that IBM doesn’t set its strategy in response to what its competitors do, but rather, according to what it thinks is right.

Rometty’s remarks can be translated as meaning IBM won’t be making any hasty decisions in light of Dell’s move. Indeed, the CEO reiterated that Big Blue won’t be making any major acquisitions of its own to try and square up to Dell/EMC.

“Some people are interested in size, but I happen not to be a believer in that,” Rometty said.

As if it hammer home that point, Rometty stated her belief that Dell/EMC is basically a hardware company. In contrast, hardware represents just 10 percent of IBM’s revenues. Rometty said she prefers to focus the company’s efforts on growing its Big Data and cloud services, which are currently growing pretty rapidly.

When asked about the possible advantage Dell/EMC might have in being a private company, Rometty said IBM’s investors understand the company’s longer-term view, so that isn’t really an issue.

Rometty does have a point in that IBM is demonstrably looking towards Big Data and cloud services as its future, and that raises questions about what Dell/EMC can do in this sphere. While it’s clear that Dell/EMC will be dominant in a declining on-premises IT market, Wikibon analyst Dave Vellante said the newly-merged company will need to figure out a long-term strategy if it’s to be relevant for decades to come.

“These are hard times in hardware, pricing is in a slow motion decline thanks to open-source and the cloud and the ‘digital matrix’ is winning,’ Vellante said in a CrowdChat. “By ‘digital matrix’, I mean the nature of the industry competition is changing, with those companies that leverage digital infrastructure – cloud, mobile, security, transactions – leading the transformation”.

Dell/EMC is currently nowhere to be seen in this emerging market. The company does have a couple of decent cloud-plays in VMware Inc.’s vCloud Air and Virtustream Inc., but both efforts are still a long way from bearing fruit.

Check out Rometty’s comments in full here: