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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Dell has announced the sale of its software division [informationweek.com] to two private equity firms, as it nears the close of its massive acquisition of EMC [bloomberg.com]. The sale includes the two "crown jewels" of the Dell Software Group, Quest Software and SonicWall, as noted in Dell's press release [dell.com] on Monday. Quest makes Toad, a popular front end to Oracle [dell.com] and other major commercial database systems, which combines a SQL IDE, data modeler, performance and benchmarking tools, and database management features. SonicWall makes a variety of network security appliances [sonicwall.com]. Also included in the deal is StatSoft, makers of Statistica [gigaom.com], an application for data mining and predictive analytics.

Earlier this year, Dell sold its IT services group to NTT Data for $3 billion.

While the sale price wasn't disclosed, the amount has been reported to be slightly greater than $2 billion [reuters.com]. That's a substantial discount from Dell's acquisition prices - they paid $2.4 billion for Quest, and $1.2 billion for Sonic Wall (both in 2012), and there are several other properties included in the package. But Dell is assuming $50 billion in debt to make the EMC deal, so the company needs the cash. Some analysts have also noted significant overlap [cmswire.com] between the offerings of Dell Software and those of EMC and VMware.

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