EMC and Microsoft extend alliance for three more years

At the New York CIO Summit this week EMC and Microsoft pulled out some heavy hitters to announce that they have extended their strategic relationship through 2011. This was significant enough that Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer and EMC CEO Joe Tucci made the announcement together. Specifically, the two companies are agreeing to broader and deeper integration between Microsoft's products and the EMC infrastructure, but considering these companies compete directly for some business, it's a strange union.

"[EMC and Microsoft] remain committed to delivering solutions that blend Microsoft’s technology with EMC’s information infrastructure portfolio, spanning across virtualization, storage, IT resource and content management, security products and consulting services,” Tucci said.

Among the key areas where they will be cooperating of concern to the content management audience is around Documentum and Microsoft's platform, providing a way to access Documentum services directly from Microsoft products. They will be developing solutions that "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." Makes sense except for the fact that many companies are using SharePoint for content management services, although it's not out of the question that companies would have SharePoint and Documentum running in the same organization.

Other areas of interest include EMC storage and Microsoft virtualization technology. This agreement is particularly interesting since EMC purchased VMware in 2004 and essentially competes with Microsoft on this front. Another area with a similar dynamic is around data protection where the two companies say they will find ways to combine EMC's data loss prevention technology (DLP) and Microsoft Active Directly Rights Management Services. These services should work well together and enable customers to set a full range of rights management while protecting data as it travels inside and outside the firewall, but again, EMC has its own rights management product having purchased Authentica back in 2006.

Given the number of companies using Microsoft products and the presence of Documentum in large enterprises, this alliance appears to make a lot of sense for both companies, especially around the Documentum/Office/SharePoint integration, but given that these companies compete directly for a lot of this business, overall the alliance is a bit odd.

For more information:
- see the EMC press release [1]