At EMC World in Las Vegas this week, EMC and Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced a partnership involving the Cisco Quad enterprise collaboration tool and EMC Documentum content management.

On its face, this is a powerful combination that takes advantage of the strengths of both companies. As the graphic below illustrates, Cisco provides all of the social and communications pieces, while EMC provides the process and content management aspects. 

For companies who are tentative about engaging in open collaboration, this provides a solution from two enterprise powerhouses that has the potential at least to give customers the best of both worlds--access to collaboration tools and the ability to control the information flowing through the collaboration stream.

Murali Sitaram, VP/GM, Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform, wrote a blog post yesterday announcing the deal and described how the two systems will work together initially.

"Our initial integration will enable end-users to access an active window into Documentum to manage their content. It will also apply common Quad attributes like Unified Communications integration, presence information, and the "hover card" pervasively across both platforms. In addition, when a user performs an action in the Documentum window, integration with Quad will enable those actions to appear within relevant activity feeds," Sitaram wrote.

While it doesn't sound exactly seamless, it is a start.

Sitaram wrote that the first implementation of this partnership will be available later this year in the third quarter.

For more information:
-see the Cisco blog post

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