Cisco and EMC team up

Cisco Systems Inc. and EMC Corp., the Hopkinton-based data storage giant, said they have formed a coalition dedicated to accelerating the ability of their corporate customers to "increase business agility through greater IT infrastructure flexibility, and lower IT, energy, and real estate costs through pervasive data center virtualization and a transition to private cloud infrastructures."

According to Bloomberg News, the collaboration will intensify the competition for serving corporate data centers with such rivals as Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM.

The coalition includes VMware Inc. EMC owns a majority stake in VMware. VMware makes "virtualization" software that dramatically increases the number of tasks that can be performed on a single computer. Companies around the world are embracing virtualization because it lets them buy fewer computers and cut energy costs.

In a press release about the coalition with EMC, California-based Cisco said, "The Virtual Computing Environment coalition offers organizations of all sizes an accelerated approach to data center transformation with dramatic efficiencies that promise significant reductions in both capital and operating expenses." (Globe Staff)