EMC and FSC extend their engagement

CeBIT EMC and Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) have expanded and extended their 10 year old strategic alliance. The two will work together on advanced data centre architectures, while FSC will also provide services for the EMC midrange storage that it sells in Europe.

"FSC is our largest partner in Europe, and our second largest worldwide, after Dell," said EMC boss Joe Tucci, adding that the alliance covers software as well as storage. "FSC does a tremendous amount today with NetWorker and VMware, for example," he said.

Using FSC as a sales channel has helped EMC achieve four consecutive years of growth in Europe, he added - it currently leads the external RAID market for Western Europe, according to IDC.

"We are expanding our relationship in four major areas," Tucci said. "Adding FSC to our Authorised Services Network will give us greater reach, we are also doing advanced development and integration of EMC technologies with FSC computing platforms, and collaborating on solutions for SAP customers and for next-generation Microsoft architectures."

FSC boss Bernd Bischoff said the EMC alliance - and in particular, the agreement on joint product development - is an important part of his company's plans to develop the dynamic data centre, or DDC. This is its vision of a self-managing IT system, based on technology such as virtualisation, blade-servers and automated management.

With FSC doing such sterling work flogging EMC's boxes for it, and its boss so eager to slap his back, it's no surprise that Tucci is happy to let the deal run and run.

"We never get to the end of the agreement, we're always renewing and renegotiating it," he said. "It's been evergreen for 10 years and we'll keep on pushing it forward." ®