"What is ironic is that IBM spun off Lenovo in their focus on big enterprise, a place where EMC has done very well with big storage and big data," Schultz said. "However, they have also done well with their acquisitions of Iomega, VMware, Mozy, RSA and others that play to and leverage Lenovo's desktop and edge focus."

Now, said Schultz, the question becomes: Who will Chinese networking and telecommunications company Huawei partner with after its storage partnership breakup with Symantec?

Forrester's Wang wrote that partnerships between multinational vendors and Chinese firms are "works in progress."

"There have been a number of similar partnerships between Chinese and [multinational] vendors before, such as the Huawei/Symantec [one] that ended in November ... after three years. Cultural differences have always been a big challenge for effective communication and execution between partners in cases such as this one," he wrote.

covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.