EMC and Microsoft announced a three-year extension of their strategic alliance through 2011. The two companies are committing to broader and deeper product interoperability and service delivery to address key customer requirements including virtualization, security and content management.

Joint customers will benefit from more productive and less costly dynamic IT infrastructures that can respond to today’s rapidly changing business requirements and economic constraints.

“Microsoft and EMC are committed to working together to create enterprise infrastructure technologies that will help businesses build extremely efficient and agile IT systems,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “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.”

“The EMC and Microsoft alliance has delivered tremendous and long-lasting value to customers for more than a decade,” said Joe Tucci, chairman, president and chief executive officer, EMC. “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.”

Microsoft offers virtualization solution from the desktop to the datacenter, including the ability to manage both physical and virtual environments from a centralized management console. EMC’s technology solutions enable storage, protection and management of information in Microsoft virtualized environments including Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center, and jointly supported mission-critical workloads such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint Server. EMC Consulting’s Application Practice, a team with Microsoft knowledge, provides expertise in assessing, planning and implementing Microsoft’s technologies in a wide array of virtualization solutions.

As part of deepening the strategic alliance, EMC will develop solutions that leverage and extend Microsoft Office SharePoint. In addition, EMC will continue to develop solutions that enable customers to use the Microsoft Office and SharePoint user interfaces to interact through business processes and workflows with content that is stored, protected and managed by EMC. Ultimately these solutions will empower customers to direct SharePoint content and Microsoft Exchange messages, along with other business content, to integrated archives for long-term preservation, thus improving operational efficiencies, enabling scalability of production systems and facilitating sound information governance and litigation readiness.

The two companies will collaborate on building information protection solutions across the Microsoft application. An example of this is how EMC and Microsoft are responding to the new demands of information security, including a record number of data breaches, by building Data Loss Prevention (DLP) technologies from RSA, the security division of EMC, into the Microsoft platform and future information protection products. The collaboration is designed to empower organizations to centrally define information security policy, identify and classify sensitive data virtually anywhere in the infrastructure, and use a range of controls to protect data at the network, data center and endpoint levels.

As a first step, the new RSA DLP Suite 6.5 has been engineered with tight interoperability with Microsoft Active Directory Rights Management Services. As a result security managers can implement information access and usage polices throughout the datacenter and on endpoints based on the sensitivity of information. Microsoft will continue to integrate data-loss prevention technology from RSA into its products to enable security managers to help monitor sensitive data and block unauthorized use.