By Shara Tibken EMC Corp. (EMC) is teaming up with Verizon Corp.'s (VZ) Terremark unit to provide cloud-computing products to customers, boosting EMC's footprint in the fast-growing market. EMC--the Hopkinton, Mass., provider of storage, security and other data-center products--said Verizon-Terremark will be standardizing its private cloud business on EMC infrastructure. Such clouds typically involve infrastructure managed for one organization. Verizon-Terremark also will offer public and hybrid clouds that use EMC technology, with hopes the company will eventually standardize those offerings on EMC infrastructure as well, said Howard Elias, EMC president and chief operating officer of information infrastructure and cloud services. The agreement with Verizon-Terremark is similar to deals EMC has reached with companies such as AT&T Inc. (T) and Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. Mr. Elias declined to provide terms of the Verizon-Terremark agreement. "There are no financial details we're disclosing, but it's significant for both companies," Mr. Elias said. "There was already a strong and growing relationship between the companies, and this amplifies that." The news comes the same day as EMC rival Oracle Corp. (ORCL) plans to unveil its new cloud offering. Many companies see a big market in cloud computing, which reduces costs by allowing users to access their applications and data over the Internet or internal networks. EMC views the hybrid cloud, which keeps some data in-house and other data on shared infrastructure, as a particularly large opportunity. EMC says its strategy differs from Oracle, Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and other competitors as it will allow customers to move their data more easily between cloud providers, as well as between their own data centers and cloud products. "Customers still don't want to give up control of their applications, workload and data, and they want the choice of where to put their workloads," Mr. Elias said. "They also want the choice to move them back and forth," which they can do with a common infrastructure. Write to Shara Tibken at shara.tibken@dowjones.com
