EMC, Microsoft Extend Strategic Alliance Through 2011

EMC and Microsoft have announced a three-year extension of their strategic alliance through 2011. The two companies are committing to broader and deeper product interoperability and service delivery to address key customer requirements including virtualisation, security and content management through the combination of Microsoft’s data centre solutions and productivity applications with EMC’s information infrastructure solutions and consultancy. As a result, joint customers will benefit from dynamic IT infrastructures that can effectively respond to today’s rapidly changing business requirements and economic constraints.

At a recently held invitation-only event for CIOs and other IT executives, Joe Tucci and Steve Ballmer discussed how the two companies will continue to deliver value to mutual customers through collaboration including a deeper focus on storage and protection of information in virtualised environments, increased productivity through centralised management of content, and security solutions to prevent data breaches.

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“Microsoft and EMC are committed to working together to create enterprise infrastructure technologies that will help businesses build extremely efficient and agile IT systems,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Corp. “Through the joint investments we are making, we will continue to deliver solutions that enable enterprise customers to meet their business goals today and lay the groundwork for future success.”

“The EMC and Microsoft alliance has delivered long-lasting value to customers for more than a decade,” said Joe Tucci, chairman, president and CEO, EMC. “With the next phase in this evolution, the companies remain committed to delivering solutions that blend Microsoft’s technology with EMC’s information infrastructure portfolio, spanning across virtualisation, storage, IT resource and content management, security products and consulting services.”

Efficient Information Infrastructure

Building efficient and dynamic IT infrastructures is a top priority for organisations across the globe. While Microsoft offers virtualisation solutions from the desktop to the datacentre, EMC’s technology solutions enable storage, protection and management of information in Microsoft virtualised environments including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft System Centre, and jointly supported mission-critical workloads such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server.

Agile Information Infrastructure

IT departments everywhere are trying to cope with growing amounts of information spread across disparate systems, such as file shares, content servers and team sites.

Organisations can link the EMC Documentum platform with Microsoft’s widely used platforms including Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft Office Outlook, and Microsoft SQL Server to improve how knowledge workers utilise information.

As part of deepening the strategic alliance, EMC will develop solutions that leverage and extend Microsoft Office SharePoint. In addition, EMC will continue to develop solutions that enable customers to use the familiar Microsoft Office and SharePoint user interfaces to interact through business processes and workflows with content that is stored, protected and managed by EMC.

Resilient Information Infrastructure

IT environments are increasingly reliant on their corporate information, meaning data loss, data unavailability or data corruption of any kind can cause severe business challenges. The two companies will collaborate on building information protection solutions across the Microsoft application. An example of this is how EMC and Microsoft are responding to the new demands of information security, including a record number of data breaches, by building Data Loss Prevention (DLP) technologies from RSA, the security division of EMC, into the Microsoft platform and future information protection products.

As a first step, the new RSA DLP Suite 6.5 has been engineered with tight interoperability with Microsoft Active Directory Rights Management Services. As a result, security managers can implement information access and usage polices throughout the data centre and on endpoints based on the sensitivity of information.