EMC Corp. (NYSE:EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, and Microsoft Corp. today announced a network management technology licensing agreement and a broader technology collaboration — combining the market’s leading solutions for network and systems management for delivery of network-aware, end-to-end service management. The two companies unveiled the alliance, today at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2007 in San Diego, Calif.

Key to the announcement, Microsoft is licensing EMC® Smarts® network discovery and health monitoring technology to be included in a future version of Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager, the company’s award-winning solution for end-to-end service monitoring in the enterprise IT environment. Additionally, EMC is also developing value-added network management and root-cause analysis management packs to be used in conjunction with both current and future versions of System Center Operations Manager.

Delivering against the initial phase of this agreement, EMC today is announcing the EMC Smarts Connector for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007. 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 — thus allowing customers to leverage the benefits of a closely integrated network and systems management suite for service availability today. The connector will be generally available in May 2007.

Taking the agreement one step further, EMC and Microsoft are collaborating on the co-development of a cross-domain behavioral model in the context of Operations Manager to improve IT operations management across disparate devices and systems. The companies are committed to driving industry standards which enhance interoperability and simplify management in today’s complex information infrastructures. Leveraging these co-developed models, Operations Manager customers will be able to determine the root cause of service issues across the modeled infrastructure. Additionally, the large ecosystem of Operations Manager partners can add to these models to broaden visibility and control to new devices, services, and applications resulting in lower management costs and reduced complexity.