The company responsible for creating most of the world’s data has deepened its ties with the company most responsible for storing it.
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and EMC (NYSE: EMC) agreed to extend their decade-old strategic alliance through 2011 and said they are committed to “broader and deeper product interoperability and service delivery” in areas like virtualization, security, content management and data storage and protection.
EMC CEO Joe Tucci and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made the announcement at an invitation-only event for CIOs and other IT executives in New York.
The two companies already work together to offer services and manage and protect data in Microsoft Hyper-V, System Center, Exchange, Outlook, SQL Server and SharePoint environments, including integration with EMC’s Documentum enterprise content management (ECM) platform.
As part of the expanded partnership, EMC said it will “develop solutions that leverage and extend Microsoft Office SharePoint.” EMC’s RSA Security unit will work with Microsoft on security and data loss prevention (DLP) technologies, and the two said they have already engineered “tight interoperability” between RSA DLP Suite 6.5 and Microsoft Active Directory Rights Management Services.
StorageIO founder and senior analyst Greg Schulz said “It’s better to see EMC and Microsoft partnered and working together, one arm around each other, than at odds with each other, as together they can hopefully streamline solutions for customers.
“On the other hand,” he added, “EMC plus Microsoft gives the non-EMC and non-Microsoft folks something to talk about.”