Under the terms of the partnership, EMC and Acxiom will first jointly develop and market information grid technology for business intelligence (BI) applications to customers as a hosted offering from Acxiom. Within two years, EMC plans to offer the BI technology based on the Acxiom grid software and its own Celerra network attached storage and related software, according to an EMC spokesman and an industry analyst.

Charles Morgan, Acxiom's chairman, said the two companies 'will be able to deliver a configurable, scalable platform in a single location where services and data content can be manipulated, stored and made available to information-centric applications.'

As part of the agreement, EMC also acquired Acxiom's information grid software for US$30 million.

John Webster, an analyst with the Data Mobility Group in Londonderry, N.H., said the partnership is a clear indication that EMC is moving into the information management space. That move began with the purchase of content management vendor Documentum Inc. for $1.7 billion in 2003.

'If you look at Acxiom's original architecture, it's a traditional data warehousing, data mining architecture where you bring data in, clean it and massage it and deliver it in the format users need,' Webster said. 'But what this deal has done, in a way, is to put a stake in the ground to say, 'This is not yesterday's architecture. It's not the traditional data warehousing architecture. This is a very different thing.''