Dell's $67 billion plan to acquire storage heavyweight EMC creates a combined company that's in a strong position to take advantage of trends shaking up the storage market, analysts said. Overall, the proposed mega-merger reflects what analysts at Wikibon have been talking about for years – that massive disruptions such as cloud computing are changing the competitive landscape, Stuart Miniman, Wikibon senior analyst and principal research contributor, said in a phone interview. In a blog post, Wikibon analysts called the deal a "major move on the enterprise IT chessboard." For EMC, the deal would allow it to better handle the transitions to flash storage, hyperconvergence, cloud computing, big data and the Internet of Things without the scrutiny of Wall Street, he said. As announced on Monday, the combined company will be privately held with VMware remaining a separate publicly traded company.