I'm foregoing this week's blog roll to allow EMC to respond to IBM's comments posted yesterday. And respond they did. This quote came in from Todd Cadley, PR for the storage management and information protection areas of EMC business:

"Given that storage virtualization is one piece to a much larger information infrastructure play and strategy, we're very confident in our three-pronged virtualization strategy of server, block and file and look forward to the green-field opportunities in the entire virtualization market.

IBM has been following EMC's information infrastructure strategy for quite some time. Just last week, they decided to purchase Arsenal Digital. As EMC expanded its portfolio with the acquisitions of Documentum (content management), Smarts (resource management), RSA (security) and now Mozy (online backup), IBM followed with their own acquisitions in these markets - FileNet, Micromuse, internet security Systems and Arsenal Digital, respectively.

It seems like IBM is looking at EMC as the prime example of how to do information infrastructure correctly."

I'm sure we've not heard the last of this. Stay tuned.