Dell Inc. is reported to be considering selling off some of its “non-core assets” in an effort to raise $10 billion ahead of its $67 billion EMC Corp. acquisition.

The usual “unnamed sources” told Reuters that Dell will take on a debt of around $49.5 billion once the acquisition is completed next year. Therefore, the company is seeking to relief some of that debt load by selling what assets it considers to be expendable.

Reuters mentions four businesses as possible candidates for a sale, including Quest Software, which offers systems management, security and business intelligence solutions; Rapid Recovery (previously AppAssure); Perot Systems, the services arm; and SonicWall, which sells email encryption and security features.

While Dell is refusing to comment on the speculation, The Register points out that each of the four above mentioned businesses either overlap with EMC products in some way, or just haven’t been very successful.

For instance, Rapid Recovery overlaps with solutions in EMC’s data protection portfolio such as Networker, which looks after data centers, and Mozy, which takes care of the end-points. SonicWall is said to be positioned against similar products from EMC’s RSA Security LLC. Meanwhile, Quest Software, which Dell acquired for $2.36 billion in 2012, clashes with some of EMC’s management products. As for Perot Systems, it doesn’t seem to clash with anything offered by EMC or its federation members, but the business has struggled to gain much steam since Dell acquired it for $3.9 billion back in 2009.

The report comes just days after it was said EMC is considering selling around 20 percent of its stake in Pivotal Software Inc., as part of an IPO planned for early next year. Dell executives have already given their approval to the idea, which was first mooted by EMC’s CEO Joe Tucci earlier this year. More recently, Dell CEO and founder Michael Dell has said he intends to pay off the debt from the EMC acquisition as quickly as possible, and so selling Pivotal certainly makes sense from that perspective.

Dell and EMC have already assigned two executives – Dell’s Rory Read and EMC’s Howard Elias – to overlook the two companies’ portfolios and work out what fits where and what is surplus to requirements. What with all of these rumors bursting out the mill, it looks like the pair have wasted little time in getting to work.

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