14 DAY TRIAL // The New York CIO Summit on February 3, 2009 was the stage where Microsoft and EMC announced an extension to their existing strategic alliance. The two companies underlined their commitment to the evolution of enterprise infrastructure technologies throughout 2011, with an enhanced focus not only on boosting the level of interoperability of their products, but also on deepening service delivery. In this context, Microsoft’s data center solutions and productivity applications will continue to play nice with EMC’s information infrastructure products even if the duo will throw into the equation new technologies including virtualization, security and content management.
“Microsoft and EMC are committed to working together to create enterprise infrastructure technologies that will help businesses build extremely efficient and agile IT systems,” explained Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer 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.”
Per the agreement, EMC’s products will enable enterprise customers to leverage storage, protection and management of information while running virtualized environments with solutions from the Redmond company, including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center, but also Exchange Server, SQL Server and SharePoint Server. At the same time, the two companies underlined that the EMC Documentum platform would continue to allow customers to connect to such solutions as Office SharePoint Server, Office Outlook, and SQL Server. Microsoft too is embracing EMC technologies, and an illustrative example in this respect is the Data Loss Prevention (DLP) technologies from RSA, which will be integrated into the Redmond company's platform and information protection products.
“The EMC and Microsoft alliance has delivered tremendous and long-lasting value to customers for more than a decade,” added Joe Tucci, chairman, president and chief executive officer, EMC Corp. “Today marks 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 virtualization, storage, IT resource and content management, security products and consulting services.”