Dimension Data and EMC announced the Catalyst Alliance, a strategic market development initiative designed to speed the adoption of hybrid cloud as a platform for transformation for the mid-size enterprise.

Through the Catalyst Alliance both organizations will make investments to develop and jointly market and sell solutions that allow clients to realize value from business strategies based on hybrid cloud and enable them to adopt new technology while managing risk.

Through the new initiative, Dimension Data and EMC plan to deliver clients comprehensive solutions that span private cloud on or off premises, public and hybrid cloud including advanced managed services for storage. Catalyst Alliance solutions feature flexible consumption based pricing models on storage, cloud and managed services. To ensure client success, a dedicated team of sales, technical and marketing specialists from Dimension Data and EMC will align client workloads and applications to the best solutions.

"For many organizations, 'hybrid cloud' is a consequence of uncoordinated cloud investments rather than a strategy for getting more from their cloud investments," noted Rick Villars, VP of Datacenter & Cloud Research at IDC. "Partnerships like Dimension Data and EMC's Catalyst Alliance that facilitate companies' cloud time-to-value while reducing the risk of disruption in IT operations will help companies move from beyond simply having a hybrid set of clouds to enacting a sound, diversified cloud strategy."

Stephen Smith, CTO, Lennar Corporation explained, “Among the vendors that we deal with there is a complex web of partnerships and alliances. As a company, we like to see companies working together that create additional value for Lennar. The partnership between EMC and Dimension Data is a great example of a partnership that delivers additional value.”

Steve Nola, Dimension Data's Group Executive for IT-as-a-Service, said, “The Catalyst Alliance will help clients realize the benefits of hybrid cloud that will be used to serve core business applications anywhere in the world. We like EMC's commitment to disruptive innovation to help clients navigate IT transformation. By combining EMC's technology leadership with Dimension Data's extensive services portfolio and global reach, clients are able to accelerate their growth, creating value for their customers and financial returns for their shareholders.”

Jay Snyder, SVP, Global Alliances at EMC Corporation, said, “Customers are being challenged with changing business models and more technology choices than ever before. This disruption is creating transformational opportunity. Businesses across all industries are swiftly moving to reinvent themselves for a new Digital Age, where technology is used to grow, innovate, enhance customer relationships and make employees more productive. This alliance will enable those transformations both through scale and speed.”