CMGI and EMC forge alliance

AltaVista to change technology base.....

[NFFC]

"Our corporate eye is aggressively focused on leveraging strategic partnerships with industry leaders [such as] EMC that support our operating companies and their goals to create internet solutions for global 2000 businesses,"

Article here. [news.ft.com]

Can anyone here translate "marketing speak"?

[tedster]

Yes, I can speak corporate marketing a little bit.

They are going to cook up package deals for big clients in order to keep all the business "in the family".

From what I know, EMC's storage solutions are state of the art. They have been exceptionally farsighted in their R&D of an infrastructure that allows applications to be available 24x7 -- and for that reason they have also been rather highly priced and propietary. As other players enter the storage field (e.g. IBM, Compaq), the pressure is coming on for EMC to maintain their market dominance.

I assume the partnership will offer one single point of contact for multi-vendor infrastructure solutions, which will make buying package deals even more enticing for the large enterprise customer. This way their packaged software/hardware/service combinations can be fully characterised and eventually designed from the earliest stages with a guarantee of multi-vendor compatibility, as long as you "stay in the family."