According to a recent post on the website of German antitrust authority Bundeskartellamt, or Federal Cartel Office, Apple, Oracle, and EMC are involved with the Microsoft-led consortium CPTN Holdings which is working out a US$450 million purchase of 882 patents from Novell.

IT industry EMC’s veteran, David Henderson, is about to retire from full-time work. His last official working day will be 24th December, though he will continue to act as a consultant for its channel business. Henderson feels that there are many people in the business who require mentoring on their board.

Offering simplified entry, time-efficient training and easy access to EMC’ s stable of infrastructure products and solutions, the EMC asserts at having made some noteworthy improvements to its Velocity Solution Provider Partner programme.

In a move that is apparently aimed at simplifying programme entry, streamlining training and easing access to the product portfolio, EMC has added new options and partner tiers to its Velocity Partner Programme; thereby underscoring the biggest changes to its channel programme in the last ten years.

To offer cloud services, four Companies namely, Orange Business Services, Cisco, EMC and VMware have entered an alliance, called Flexible 4 Business.

Reports coming from the Virtual Computing Environment coalition (VCE), a joint venture between network giant Cisco and virtualisation software maker VMware and network storage provider EMC, have agreed to work hands in glove with the first European customer for its first ever VBlock product, claims the IT news website The Register.

A new device named "V-CX" is being planned to be launched by EMC by the month of April. This device will be a combined SAN/NAS product for reviving the CLARiiON and Celerra's best bits. SAN/NAS devices are generally termed "unified storage".

NetApp is also depicting its unified storage cred through a nifty graphic on its home page.

The world's biggest manufacturer of storage computers, EMC Corp., said that it intends to purchase shares of VMware Inc. in the open market to maintain its 80% possession of the company.

Yesterday, EMC's Chief Financial Officer, David Goulden, said, "Keeping the stake in VMware enables EMC to maximize value for investors".

EMC Corp., the world's biggest maker of storage computers, reported its fourth-quarter profit and a full- year forecast that surpassed analysts' speculations as corporate technology spending witnessed a rebound.

Going by the latest reports, the current week may witness the materialization of a long-rumored tie-up between Cisco systems and EMC. The alliance - between the networking biggie and server aspirant Cisco Systems and the storage powerhouse and VMware owner EMC - will result in bringing forth bundled computing gear and services.