Could someone throw money at EMC and gobble them up in order to grab at their real target of acquisition - VMware?  That's the interesting thought floated out there in a recent article on Barron's.

Pacific Crest’s Brent Bracelin floats that idea in a research note this morning. In short, he figures that core EMC - the company without its 86% stake in VMW - is worth about 16x enterprise value/free cash flow, ex-the contribution from VMW. Given the current valuation of VMware - it is now a hair under $40 billion - he figures the market is discounting the EMC stake in VMW by 65%.

His conclusion: EMC is becoming vulnerable to being acquired for its VM stake. “We assign an increasing probability to the scenario that EMC could become a vehicle for a take-out of VMware within the next year,” he writes, “given its controlling stake in VMware that trades at a significant discount.” He names IBM (IBM), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Cisco (CSCO), Oracle (ORCL) and Microsoft (MSFT) as “potential suitors that make strategic sense.”

Bracelin says the huge increase in VMware shares since its August 15 IPO at $29 has been created in part by scarcity value, with only 10% of the stock in the float. Nonetheless, he says there is still a “material disconnect” between the value of EMC and VMW. He says a discount to the market value of EMC’s stake is reasonable, but thinks the magnitude has become overdone. Without discounting VMW’s shares, the market price implies a 56% drop in the value of core EMC since the VMW initial offering.

Read the entire article, here.