EMC acquires Microsoft services firm

Buying Interlink Group will bolster EMC's growing Microsoft practice.

EMC is on a roll this week with the acquisition of Interlink Group, a firm that provides professional services for Microsoft environments.

The acquisition comes on the heels of its purchase of replication and continuous data protection vendor Kashya Networks, which EMC picked up for $153 million.

At the company's annual EMC world conference last month, EMC chairman and CEO Joe Tucci promised that users would see EMC aggressively acquiring companies, especially in the area of managed services.

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EMC is on a roll this week with the acquisition of Interlink Group, a firm that provides professional services for Microsoft environments.

The acquisition comes on the heels of its purchase of replication and continuous data protection vendor Kashya Networks, which EMC picked up for $153 million.

At the company's annual EMC world conference last month, EMC chairman and CEO Joe Tucci promised that users would see EMC aggressively acquiring companies, especially in the area of managed services.

The expertise of the Interlink Group in application development, integration and content management for Microsoft environments will bolster EMC's growing Microsoft practice.

"Professional services is a profit engine for most companies because IT shops just don't have the people to do anything but manage what they have – they can't handle any new projects," says Randy Kerns, an independent storage analyst. "IBM certainly has proved that."

Last year, the company started building its Microsoft services practice with the acquisition of Internosis. Recently it expanded its alliance with Microsoft by joining the company's Simple SAN program, which focuses on the deployment of easy-to-use and manage storage-area networks in Windows 2003 environments.

EMC has also brought out several bundled storage packages for Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server networks. In addition, its EMC Clariion arrays have been certified as iSCSI target arrays in Windows environments.

The Interlink Group is based in Englewood, Colo., where it attained Microsoft Gold Certified Partner status and was awarded the 2005 Microsoft Partner of the Year in the western U.S. The company, which employs 180 people, has special expertise in Microsoft Dynamics CRM software.

Details of the transaction were not disclosed.