EMC and VMware recently held a joint analyst meeting in New York to show off the Pivotal Initiative, a set of spun off assets that will become an independent company on April 1st. Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman was at the event this week, appearing on this morning’s NewsDesk segment to go over the details with Kristin Feledy.

He starts off by saying that it’s highly unusual for two publicly traded companies to hold a joint summit, even though EMC happens to own 80 percent of VMware’s stock. The reason the two firms decided to co-host the event is because they wanted to clear things up about the EMC, VMware and Pivotal federation for Wall Street.

Miniman goes on to elaborate on the motives behind the foundation of Pivotal:

“If you look at where EMC and VMware are today as strong leaders in their respective businesses and where they need to go in the future, Pivotal really sits in that intersection. [It’s] a turning point where customers need to say… ‘how do really I take advantage of the cloud, how do I take advantage of big data – things that can radically disrupt the markets that EMC and VMware have today?’ Putting them in a separate company …was rather apropos.”

Feledy points out that the portfolios of EMC, VMware and Pivotal overlap in several areas, and asks Miniman whether this is workable from a strategic standpoint. He says that it is, and notes that this approach beats the alternative: leaving gaps for the competition to exploit. The three firms chose to cover all bases at the price of a few rough edges over forfeiting competitive advantage.

One of those rough edges is the impact on the channel: the cloud trio will be looking to work with the same partners in many scenarios, many of which may turn out to be mutually exclusive. To make things worse, some of their offerings – such as VMware’s newly announced hybrid cloud solution – will directly compete products.

For the full analysis, including an in-depth look into the federation’s storage and end-user computing lineups, check out the interview below.