Lenovo and EMC Corporation today announced a broad partnership that enhances Lenovo's position in industry standard servers and networked storage solutions, while expanding EMC's reach in China and other high-growth markets. "Today's announcement with industry leader EMC is another solid step in our journey to build on our foundation in PCs and become a leader in the new PC-plus era," said Yuanqing Yang, Lenovo chairman and CEO. "This partnership will help us fully deliver on our PC-plus strategy by giving us strong back-end capabilities and business foundation in servers and storage, in addition to our already strong position in devices. EMC is the perfect partner to help us fully realize the PC-plus opportunity in the long term."

The partnership is leveraging the two leading companies' respective strengths, across three main areas:

First, Lenovo and EMC have formed a server technology development program that will accelerate and extend Lenovo's capabilities in the x86 industry-standard server segment. These servers will be brought to market by Lenovo and embedded into selected EMC storage systems over time.

Second, the companies have forged an OEM and reseller relationship in which Lenovo will provide EMC's networked storage solutions to its customers, initially in China and expanding into other global markets in step with the ongoing development of its server business.

Finally, EMC and Lenovo plan to bring certain assets and resources from EMC's Iomega business into a new joint venture which will provide Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems to small/medium businesses (SMB) and distributed enterprise sites.

In the joint venture, Lenovo will contribute cash, while EMC will contribute certain assets and resources of Iomega. Upon closing, Lenovo will hold a majority interest in the new joint venture.

The joint venture is subject to customary closing procedures including regulatory approvals and is expected to close by the end of 2012.