Microsoft and EMC channel partners will benefit from a licencing and collaboration agreement the two companies have signed, says an EMC executive.
The pact, covering network management tools the two companies make, was unveiled Tuesday at the Microsoft Management Summit in San Diego.
Microsoft is licencing EMC’s Smarts network discovery technology for inclusion in an upcoming version of Microsoft System Centre Operations Manager (formerly called Microsoft Operations Manager, or MOM).
At the same time, EMC will develop network management and root-cause analysis management packs its partners can sell to be used with current and future versions of Operations Manager.
In an interview Chris Gahagan, senior vice-president of EMC’s resource management software, said Microsoft wants to take advantage of the diagnostic capabilities in its Smarts technology to track down infrastructure problems.
In large network environments it can be hard to determine where a piece of infrastructure is failing, he said.
An erratic switch, for example, can look like several applications are failing or servers are disconnecting from the network.
Smarts can analyze behavior to give a root cause analysis to identify the real problem. However, for it to be effective it has to have domain and application expertise. Microsoft brings that with its knowledge of its product line.
At the same time Microsoft has “a hole in Operations Manager, in that it didn’t discover networks,” said Gahagan, a big problem because most modern applications are Web-based.
The companies believe both problems are solved by teaming up.“EMC now has a way to extend its reach with Smarts,” said Gahagan, ‘because we now have access to domain (Microsoft) experts who can write (behavior) models” for their applications.
The first practical product VARs will be able to sell to Microsoft customers will be EMC Smarts Connect for Microsoft System Centre Operations Manager 2007. EMC says this two-way connector enables Smarts to share network discovery, topology and root-cause events with Operations Manager, and for Operations Manager to synchronize alert status and resolution back to EMC Smarts technology. It will be available in May.
The two companies are also working together on developing what they call a cross-domain behavioral model for Operations Manager to improve control across disparate devices and systems.
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