EMC & Microsoft Extend Strategic Alliance

At an event in New York City, EMC CEO Joe Tucci and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced an extension of their companies' strategic alliance through 2011. The pair discussed how EMC and Microsoft will continue delivering value to their mutual customers by focusing on storage and information protection in virtualized environments, increasing productivity through centralized content management, and preventing data breaches with leading-edge security solutions.

Moving forward, EMC and Microsoft will focus their efforts in three areas:

Efficient Information Infrastructures -- To build dynamic and efficient IT infrastructures that use advances in server virtualization, tiered storage, and IT management, and leverage the ability to manage both physical and virtual environments, information storage, protection, and management solutions for Microsoft virtualized environments. In addition, EMC Consulting's Application Practice will provide assessment, planning, and implementation services for Microsoft technologies in a wide array of virtualization environments.

Agile Information Infrastructures -- To help organizations cope with growing amounts of information spread across disparate systems, such as file shares, content servers, and team sites, and as a demonstration of deepening ties between the companies, EMC will develop solutions that leverage and extend Microsoft Office SharePoint. In addition, EMC will continue to develop solutions that use familiar Microsoft Office and SharePoint user interfaces to interact with content stored, protected and managed by EMC Documentum.

Resilient Information Infrastructures -- To reduce the likelihood of data loss, data unavailability, and data corruption, the companies will develop information protection solutions across Microsofts application portfolio. As a first step, the new RSA DLP (Data Loss Prevention) Suite 6.5 has been tightly integrated with Microsoft Active Directory Rights Management Services, allowing security managers to implement information access and usage polices throughout the data center and on endpoints.In the IT industry, the practice of "co-opetition" -- where companies that are fierce competitors in some areas closely collaborate in others -- is common to the point of cliché. But while many such efforts are essentially mundane, some others provide tangible benefits to their mutual customers. We would place EMC's and Microsoft's alliance into this latter category.

Why is this the case? For two reasons: First, both companies are developing centralized data center and information management solutions, a critical value proposition for client organizations struggling with ever-expanding information assets and ever-increasing IT infrastructure complexity. Perhaps more importantly, the two are also following paths that have led them far beyond their traditional areas of interest and expertise. Such a similarity of evolutionary intent can occasionally, as in the case of EMC and Microsoft, result in competitive and cultural overlaps that are beneficial for customers.

What sorts of benefits? Broadly speaking, EMC provides storage, protection, and management of information in Microsoft virtualized environments and jointly supported mission-critical workloads. For example, EMC SAN solutions can be used to seamlessly support Microsoft Exchange environments. Another example: Along with tightly integrating RSA DLP Suite 6.5 with Active Directory Rights Management Services, Microsoft will continue to integrate data-loss prevention technology from RSA into its products to enable security managers to monitor sensitive data and block unauthorized use. Still another: Companies can already link the EMC Documentum platform with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Outlook, and SQL Server. But as part of deepening the strategic alliance, EMC will develop solutions that enable customers to use the familiar Office and SharePoint interfaces to interact (through business processes and workflows) with content stored, protected, and managed by EMC.

Good enough, but why go to the effort of pledging to continue their alliance in so public a setting? For both practical and strategic reasons. From a practical standpoint, standing together should help EMC and Microsoft, as well as their mutual customers, weather continuing economic turbulence. Collaborations are also likely to result in service and solution synergies -- where the combined offering outweighs the sum of its individual parts. That has certainly been the case with previous EMC/Microsoft offerings, and we expect it to continue in their new and future virtualization, information management, and data resiliency solutions.

But a public show of solidarity also allows EMC and Microsoft to strategically demonstrate that their alliance has been made for the long haul, a critical issue considering some areas -- including server virtualization -- where they compete aggressively. At a time of increasing economic uncertainty, the last thing enterprises need is to worry about their favored vendors coming, figuratively, to blows. In essence, the New York City alliance event allowed EMC and Microsoft to show some of their most important customers the inherent value of collaborations built on mutual strength, understanding, and respect.— Charles King, President and Principal Analyst for research firm Pund-IT Inc. , focuses on business technology evolution and interpreting the effects these changes will have on vendors, their customers, and the greater IT marketplace.