EMC To Buy Microsoft Partner Internosis

The 300-person Internosis team will become the foundation of the Microsoft practice in EMC&'s Technology Solutions professional services group, sources said. EMC plans to use the acquisition to significantly expand its Microsoft services offerings and as a means to deliver more bullet-proof Windows storage solutions to partners, they said. Up until now, EMC has had a relatively small Windows storage and infrastructure consulting effort.

EMC is set to announce the deal this week, sources said. EMC would not comment and Internosis could not be reached for comment. Specific terms of the deal for the privately held Internosis were unavailable. The company is partly owned by investment firm General Atlantic Partners.

According to Internosis&' Web site, it has offices in Boston, Colorado Springs, Colo., New York and Washington, D.C. Clients include Sunoco, Digitas, Analog Devices and the U.S. Army, Navy and Marines.

The deal illustrates how EMC is trying to push beyond its storage roots into Windows application infrastructure, document management and related services, sources familiar with the deal said.

“If I were EMC and I&'m really trying to sell storage (and using storage-hungry apps to drive demand) I&'d really want to facilitate Notes-to-Exchange migration, which is one of the things Internosis does,” said one source familiar with the Internosis offerings. “Their [Exchange 2003] work for the U.S. Army, for example, used a lot of EMC SANs for storage—17 terabytes, triple-redundant for each of the planned 200 Exchange nodes.”

Mark Teter, CTO of Advanced Systems Group, a storage integrator in Denver, said the acquisition makes sense given EMC&'s increasing move into the Microsoft Exchange storage environment and the company&'s partnership with Dell, which also is offering Exchange services. “This augments the Dell effort and it nicely fits into their data management and data archival strategies—especially with what Microsoft has planned for Exchange,” he said.

Teter said he did not feel it would be a threat to solution providers playing in the Microsoft environment given the size of the market opportunity.

“Potentially it could be helpful to EMC partners looking for auxiliary consulting opportunities,” he said. “They can&'t do it all. That is one thing I have learned when these giants engage in the field with solution sets. They are only getting to the tip of the iceberg. There are a whole lot of customers that can benefit from these types of services.”

The Internosis deal comes after EMC last week said it was acquiring information grid software from Acxiom, a Little Rock, Ark.-based business-intelligence provider, for $30 million. The acquisition was part of a broader technology and distribution partnership and under the terms of the agreement, EMC and Acxiom plan to jointly develop and market an information-grid solution to customers as a hosted offering from Acxiom.

Additionally, EMC and Acxiom said they plan to integrate relevant systems, software, services and data from both companies into a complete product-based information-grid solution.