EMC and IBM Pursue Storage Coopetition

EMC Corporation announced the extension and expansion of a technology licensing agreement with IBM Corp. that provides EMC with certain interfaces for storage interoperability and technical support for the IBM i operating environment.  The five year agreement, which extends and expands the initial agreement signed in March 2006, will allow customers to continue to deploy combinations of EMC storage and IBM Power Systems technologies.

Financial terms are not being disclosed.

Barbara Robidoux, EMC Vice President, Storage Product Marketing, added: "The extension and expansion of our agreement with IBM will help us continue to deliver the benefits of EMC’s information infrastructure solutions to IBM Power Systems customers. Through technology licensing agreements such as this, EMC is furthering its commitment to providing our mutual customers using the IBM i operating environment with industry leading storage systems, software and services."

Jim Herring, Director IBM Power Systems Hardware Business Line said: "This agreement underscores IBM’s commitment to open innovation and is consistent with our drive towards industry interoperability. The ability for IBM i clients to attach IBM and/or EMC storage provides them with broad industry choices to meet their growing workload needs."  

This is the latest in a series of agreements between EMC and IBM. In June 2007, the companies extended their licensing agreement for the zSeries attachment architecture which enables the interoperability of EMC Symmetrix family of storage systems with IBM System z. In addition to the initial IBM i licensing agreement signed in March 2006, EMC and IBM announced a licensing agreement in October 2003 that provided EMC with access to a range of storage interfaces and functionality for other IBM Systems lines and agreed to a mutual exchange of open-standards based interfaces for improved manageability and interoperability. In June 2005, the companies extended their cooperative support agreement, which facilitates mutual response to joint customer issues including, the IBM Power System and all other IBM Systems lines.