EMC And Microsoft: Towards A More Balanced Perspective

Yesterday was a busy day.  EMC made our big FAST announcement.  And, almost as an attempt to  distract, one of our competitors announced an expanded relationship with Microsoft.

The majority of the buzz yesterday was around the first topic.  That's good. But I noticed a thread of speculation that perhaps EMC and Microsoft were moving farther apart?

Nothing could be further than the truth.

So, I thought I'd use this post to share with you a bit of detail behind the scenes.  If you're interested in Microsoft, or just how corporate alliances work in the IT world, you might be interested in this post.

The Background

Microsoft is a large, complex and very successful organization with many interrelated strategies.  They've also developed one of the most mature and respected capabilities around forming industry partnerships.

We at EMC have long admired their capabilities and professionalism, and have always aspired to emulate some of their best-of-breed approaches.  Within the walls of EMC, we highly respect not only Microsoft's technology, but their market prowess as well.

They, like EMC, are very comfortable with the concept of co-opetition.  For any vendor with a broad portfolio, you'll inevitably find areas where you can cooperate successfully, and other areas where you'll agree to compete.

And, with Microsoft, the one area where we tend to compete a bit (core hypervisor technology) is far outweighed by the many areas where we successfully cooperate (storage, security, management, backup, archiving, content management, services, etc.). 

And, even in that one area (hypervisors), we've all found ways to work together that might surprise you, as you'll see in a moment.

One of the reasons I think this story needs to be told is simple: at one point in my career, I was at "ground zero" for forming key aspects of the current EMC-Microsoft relationship. 

There's a lot of my personal blood, sweat and tears that went into this one!

The Early Years

When EMC was primarily a storage vendor, our Microsoft relationship were primarly around storage integration, storage certification, particular use cases, deep technical expertise, etc.  We invested very heavily in qualification and interoperability, and strove to be first-and-best among storage vendors in large-scale Microsoft environments -- and continue to do so to this day.

As a result, you will find a sizable hardcore engineering team within EMC that lives and breathes Microsoft.  Among other things, they are quite adept at Hyper-V technology, because (a) customers use it, and (b) customers are always right.

But as EMC expanded, acquired companies and started moving into adjacent markets, it was pretty obvious that we were becoming far more than a storage vendor, and -- regarding Microsoft -- we needed far more than a simple storage-based relationship. 

But we weren't quite sure how to approach it until there was an unexpected forcing function.

EMC Acquires VMware

As part of our VMware acquisition, we found ourselves the proud owner of an aggressive technology company that Microsoft took a particularly dim view of.  As a result, we had a simple strategic choice: decide to go fight it out with Microsoft over this one issue (not good), or "double down" on our overall relationship in areas of mutual benefit, and agree to cooperate in certain aspects of virtualization (much preferred!).

After an enormous amount of effort on the part of many people, this resulted in a CEO-level alliance announcement between EMC and Microsoft in 2006. 

As such things go, it was extremely broad and deep, and included technology integration, joint development, IP exchanges, services, solutions and go to market.  Both companies invested big money to make things happen.

This alliance was formally renewed and expanded in 2009.

Although it's hard to judge the substance of any technology alliance from a press release, I would invite interested parties to compare the scope, substance and degree of commitment of these alliance announcements with the more recent one made by one of our competitors.

Broad Technology Integration

Technology alliances can create significant value for customers if there's technology integration beyond the ordinary "my stuff works with your stuff" sort of thing we see so frequently.  EMC was already doing an enormous amount of that sort of integration with Microsoft, but we both wanted to do even more.

Our first major effort in this vein was to bring together our Documentum portfolio with Microsoft's Sharepoint and related technologies in ECM (enterprise content management), in effect, significantly extending Microsoft's capabilities in the enterprise. 

Our second major effort was around systems management, which involved licensing Smarts technology to Microsoft, as well as developing a bi-directional connector between Smarts and Ops Manager 2007. 

Our third major effort was around data loss protection, which provided a DLP solution for Windows Rights MAnagement Services (RMS) and will allow Microsoft to build RSA DLP technology into future Microsoft products.

This is in addition to work done, for example, by VMware around particular standards and certification programs, most notably OVF -- the open virtualization format.

And, of course, a vast array of storage-related "my stuff is tightly integrated with your stuff" joint efforts that are far too numerous to count.  Not only in larger environments, but smaller ones as well :-)

But we knew we had to do far more than even this unprecedented level of technology engagement.

Microsoft and EMC Consulting

One of the ways that Microsoft goes to market is through services partners that take Microsoft's technology and makes it work for customers.

Simply put, if we were going to be strategically relevant to Microsoft, we needed that sort of capability -- at scale -- within the EMC family.

This resulted in the acquisition of a series of Microsoft-focused consultancies such as Internosis, Interlink, Geniant and Cochango to form the EMC Microsoft Practice, now part of EMC Consulting.  As a result, EMC has been one of the largest and most capable delivery arms for Microsoft-specific development, integration and migration services for quite a while now. 

Not surprisingly, this portfolio includes some pretty sophisticated Hyper-V related services.  I don't know if anyone keeps score, but we've probably been involved in more large-scale Hyper-V projects than just about anyone.

Executive Support And Buy-In

I know it shouldn't matter, but it does -- you can sort of measure the importance of a technology alliance by the level of sponsorship within each organization.

On the EMC side, Microsoft gets an enormous amount of exec attention (as well they should!), with Joe Tucci taking a hands-on role and Howard Elias being the prime motivating force behind the scenes, now joined by Pat Gelsinger who has recently joined EMC from Intel.

On the Microsoft side, we get excellent support from Steve Ballmer with Bob Muglia pairing off with Howard, and now Pat.  The two CEOs are said to be good personal friends, and enjoy doing joint events, a recent example of which can be found here and here.

Microsoft Uses EMC To Run Their Business

We've also been very fortunate that Microsoft has selected EMC to run key parts of their internal infrastucture.  That's an honor and a privilege to have such an esteemed organization as a customer. 

And, yes, they pay for their stuff :-)

A few examples are public, most notably Microsoft's adCenter using Symmetrix to run a honkin' SQLserver implementation, Microsoft IT creating a storage utility using CLARiiON, and more recently Microsoft's internal deployment of RSA's DLP capability.

And, Yes, EMC Supports Hyper-V

Why wouldn't we?  Customers demand choice.  If you think about it, EMC has always been largely agnostic regarding operating system, database, application, etc. -- and hypervisors are no different.

In addition to the very highest level of eLab certification (as well as skilled field practitioners through EMC Consulting and other functions), we've started to do far more with Hyper-V integration.  In addition to the usual press release support (all too common these days), we're done some advanced replication work with RecoverPoint.

Trust me, more is coming.  You also might be interested in this video with EMC's Brian Martin (kind of the Chad Sakac of the Hyper-V world) chatting with Microsoft's Jim Schwartz, a key figure with Microsoft's virtualization team.

Partner Awards

I am always highly skeptical of these sorts of things (you should be too), but -- yes -- we get our fair share of those as well.  You can find examples here and here.

The greatest honor?

The techies at Microsoft seem to like EMC's stuff.  They use it more than you think.  Including this spy shot from a place I'm not supposed to talk about -- recognize that big blue light bar?

Final Thoughts

The world of technology alliances is rich and complex.  Separating the wheat from the chaff can be difficult.

I'll leave it to you to evaluate whether or not any particular vendor alliance is meaningful, or simply manufactured for purpose.

All I can vouch for is what EMC is doing -- and this represents just a small subset of what EMC has done -- and continues to do -- with Microsoft. 

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise ...

Comments

[Preston de Guise]

Hi Chuck,

I have to ask - if EMC and Microsoft are so buddy-buddy, why is it taking an insanely long time for NetWorker to support Windows 2008 Service Pack 2? Currently the ETA for support is Q2, 2010. (Symantec by comparison is Q1, 2010).

The disappointing thing about this is that every OS vendor has very comprehensive developer programmes, yet the turnaround time it takes for backup vendors (EMC, Symantec, etc.) to support new releases is really quite poor.

Surely as such a strong partner of Microsoft, EMC would be not only part of developer programmes but would have all divisions able to access in-development OSes and patches so as to ensure compatibility is provided sooner?

Cheers,

Preston.

[Chuck Hollis]

Hi Preston

Sorry you're frustrated with all of us vendors.

But I bet you know already what I'm about to tell you. Some releases are small impacts to layered products, others are larger ones. Sometimes we all get useful code far in advance, other times we don't. We'd all like to have unlimited engineering budgets, but we don't.

We have more than a few engineers here at EMC that started out in enterprise IT environments. They're amazed about how much work goes into something as ostensibly pedestrian as support for a Windows Service Pack -- not only coding, but integration, testing, etc.

I know that's no excuse, and we all could do better.

Thanks for writing!

-- Chuck

[Preston de Guise]

Hi Chuck,

I realise in this case that Windows 2008 SP2 is ostensibly Windows 2009 under another name - i.e., there's been a lot of changes. I guess though I find it slightly incredulous that there isn't a closer working relationship. I understand there's only so much development that can be done against developer releases of the operating system, but it still seems like a long wait.

Regardless, don't want to (completely) hijack the thrust of your post. It's good to see all the other initiatives that are there - thanks for summarising them so succinctly.

Cheers,

Preston.

[Paul P]

Hehe,

Actually, its the other way around. Apparently the other storage vendor was awfully dissapointed that EMC crashed their media release, with your FAST announcement...

How rude of EMC.

BTW, Im glad we have EMC to show everyone how to be more balanced in regards to 'partner' media releases... The way you have been banging on about VCE and Acadia on your blog, I thought you would never get off the topic, and, ahem, be more balanced. :-)

[Chuck Hollis]

Hi Paul

We never intended to "crash" anyone else's release date. Our date had been picked far in advance, based on the product's GA date.

You're right, I have been talking a lot about VCE, Vblocks and Acadia. Two reasons for that -- one, I've been working on it for well over a year (I tend to talk about stuff I work on, naturually), and -- two, it *is* a really big deal to many people.

Thanks for writing!

-- Chuck