EMC’s shares were down more than 6 percent Wednesday after the company released its third-quarter earnings.

That’s not nearly as bad as VMware’s dip of nearly 20 percent after its earnings call yesterday (EMC is an 80 percent owner of VMware). Both companies are citing the same reason for possible lackluster future earnings: reticence on the part of business customers to finalize their cloud strategies.

While VMware’s COO Carl Eschenbach referred to a “secular shift” among enterprise customers, EMC’s CEO Joseph Tucci talked about a “pause” in enterprise cloud spending.

Tucci said that business customers know they need to go to a cloud structure, and in particular a hybrid cloud structure, but because they’re not 100 percent sure what their future will look like, they’re “going to buy just enough just in time,” he said.

Tucci said customers are doing a lot of analysis to decide what to buy from whom, and “a lot of that activity ends up in the end of the quarter.”  He added, "So, [we] and everyone I talk to of my peers is lamenting about how late these quarters are coming in.”

When asked how long this pause might last, Tucci said, “Usually when these things happen, you're talking a couple years.”

Just yesterday, VMware and EMC announced they would jointly own Virtustream, and of course, last week Dell announced it was buying EMC for $67 billion.

When asked why these joint ownership structures are a good idea, Tucci said in the past each company specialized, whether it was storage or servers or networking, but these days, “nobody is staying in their lane. We've moved into converged infrastructure. It's a different world out here now. And basically to play in it, you also have to do co-opetition.”

EMC reported third-quarter 2015 revenue of $6.08 billion, up 1 percent year over year. Non-GAAP earnings per share were 43 cents.

Quotes taken from the Seeking Alpha transcript of the earnings call.