EMC and Capgemini team up on storage-as-a-service offering

EMC and Capgemini have announced a five-year partnership to offer a range of cloud offerings, starting with storage-as-a-service.

Data will be stored on EMC hardware, which will be located in Capgemini's datacentres.

The companies also promised that a messaging-as-a-service offering, providing email capabilities, will be rolled out over the next 12 to 18 months.

The new storage service is intended to compete with cloud heavyweights Amazon and Google.

Amazon's Simple Storage Service is the most well known storage-as-a-service offering on the market, while Google launched Google Storage for Developers last year.

Sunil Parekh, director for global infrastructure services at Capgemini, explained that the strength of the EMC/Capgemini storage offering is that it combines EMC's storage skills with Capgemini's outsourcing and integration experience.

"EMC did not have much experience in services and was looking for a partner that could work on a broad range of services, that was global in reach and that had experience in consulting and business outsourcing," he told V3.

The benefit of storage-as-a-service is that it allows organisations to make savings in personnel, hardware and physical storage space by paying on a cost-per-gigabyte-stored and a cost-per-gigabyte-transferred basis.

Parekh said that EMC and Capgemini will not be publically disclosing the costs of the new cloud services, neither of which yet have brand names.

Capgemini's relationship with EMC dates back to 2002 when the companies began offering joint pay-as-you-go storage services.