EMC, Fujitsu Siemens Extend Strategic Alliance

EMC Corp. and Fujitsu Siemens Computers have extended their strategic alliance through 2008 as the two firms increase jointly-developed solutions that are becoming mutually advantageous in North America and Europe.

In announcing the extension of the alliance Thursday, the two firms pointed to cooperative development of solutions in e-mail consolidation, global fail-over and data protection as fruitful areas for both firms. While the European and North American markets are different, they increasingly have similar IT problems.

"Compliance is becoming important in Europe," said John Koury, EMC's vice president of global channel marketing in an interview. "In the U. S., it's driven by the federal government. It gives us the opportunity to get ahead of the curve in Europe." New accounting reporting in the U. S. is required by Sarbanes-Oxley legislation while in Europe new requirements by the European Union are driving compliance.

In noting the two firms' cooperative work in e-mail, Koury said they worked together on e-mail consolidation. "In the past, people used to take e-mail for granted," he said. "Now it's almost mission critical. And Europe is catching up."

Where do EMC's recent acquisitions of Legato, Documentum and VMware fit in the picture with Fujitsu Siemens? Koury noted that Legato has had a decade-long relationship with Legato. The more recent Documentum and VMware acquisitions are still being melded into the EMC-Fujitsu Siemens operation.The two firms cooperate in the whole area of data protection, or as Koury called it -- "backup. restore and recovery." Recently the companies demonstrated a global "fail-over" and recovery of a live SAP ERP application between EMC operations in Massachusetts and Ireland. The application was intentionally failed in Massachusetts and within minutes it was up and running the SAP transactions in Ireland.

The demonstration used EMC's SRDF/Asynchronous remote replication software and its Symmetrix DMX GigE multi-protocol channel directors. Fujitsu Siemens contributed its Primecluster product suite. EMC's SRDF/A's extended-distance replication software uses no host involvement and helps to recover applications. Primecluster monitors the cluster "heartbeat" to protect against primary site failure.

Fujitsu Siemens is EMC's largest reseller of its Symmetrix Systems. It also markets EMC's Celerra file servers, Centera content addressed storage solutions, Connectrix switches and EMC open software solutions. The firms will jointly demo their various approaches to data storage at the CeBIT trade show in Germany later this month.