Bryan Wang, a principal analyst with Forrester Research, that the EMC partnership provides a boost that will help Lenovo develop X86 server products targeting the global market.

Lenovo's existing server business is mostly based in China. With the new ThinkServer brand, it is looking to enter the global market, according to Wang. "In the past 12 months, EMC has accumulated experience from a previous partnership with Dell and recruited server talent from IBM," he wrote.

EMC may leverage the Lenovo relationship to create an EMC-branded appliance.

"The current arrangement only shows that EMC will integrate Lenovo server products to complement its storage product portfolio. But considering that major competitors IBM, Oracle and HP are all announcing appliance products in the market, EMC may use the [joint venture with Lenovo] to follow suit," Wang wrote.

Roger Cox, a vice president of research at Gartner who covers data center convergence, said the new Lenovo relationship doesnt mean EMC is looking to enter the saturated server market, where margins are thin. But he agreed with Wang that EMC will likely use Lenovos server technology in appliances, like the Greenplum big data analytics appliance it currently sells.