EMC Broadens Cloud Services Portfolio

EMC continues to ramp up its presence in the cloud after announcing a new portfolio of infrastructure services and applications.

As part of that effort, the company will offer ways for customers to accelerate a move to desktop as a service (DaaS) and better incorporate mobile technologies.

Strategic Moves

This is just the latest in a series of fairly big moves for EMC. Earlier in March, its consulting division stepped into the security arena with five new risk-management advisory services, designed to help customers secure data while meeting various regulatory and compliance requirements. It followed that up with the acquisition of Pivotal Labs, a privately held provider of software development tools and services, which could help expand its big data analytics, social networking and next-generation application development capabilities.

Businesses’ rising use of virtualisation, cloud computing, mobile and big data applications have all dramatically altered how organisations deliver and manage information. That compelled EMC to offer its security-advisory services, and it’s now helping drive this new cloud initiative.

EMC’s cloud-optimised applications will allow the virtualisation of mission-critical applications; services will include application replatforming and application infrastructure optimisation. The EMC Cloud Infrastructure Services will assist clients in determining whether a hybrid, public or private cloud is right for them.

In a 21 March press release announcing the new services, EMC made a point of aligning its cloud capability with VMware; for example, its DaaS plans leverage VMware View (among other technologies).

Cloud Standards

“VMware and EMC have a strong services relationship for helping mutual customers virtualise business-critical applications, modernise application platforms and deploy end-user computing solutions,” Carl Eschenbach, co-president of VMware’s Customer Operations, wrote in a statement attached to that release. “With thousands of VMware-trained professionals, EMC’s technical depth and expertise enable customers to reduce costs, increase agility and build scalable infrastructures.”

Earlier in 2012, EMC joined Cisco, SAP and other companies in backing an open-standards initiative to enhance the portability of cloud applications and services.

That initiative, overseen by the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, is known as the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA), and will enable the interoperable description of application and infrastructure cloud services, as well as the relationships between parts of a service and the operational behaviour of said services.

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