Lenovo and EMC have completed the formation of their joint venture announced last summer. Under the terms of the agreement, the two companies will collaborate on co-branded Network Attached Storage (NAS) components. Eric Arcese, president and general manager of LenovoEMC Ltd., described the partnership as a chance to “pursue growth opportunities and drive innovation in the SMB NAS market.” EMC brings its Iomega portfolio, which includes the EMC LifeLine operating system, to the venture; those assets will combine with Lenovo’s ThinkServer and ThinkStation server and workstation products. Lenovo and EMC will also partner on the development of x86 server technology, as well as the respective companies’ resellers. Lenovo will hold a majority stake of the partnership, while EMC will contribute resources and assets. For the latter, the partnership is a chance to squeeze more juice out of Iomega, a subsidiary that began its existence as a consumer storage company before shifting to network-storage devices. For EMC, the partnership will help prop open the door to the China market, given Lenovo’s position as that region’s largest PC seller. “The relationship with Lenovo represents a powerful opportunity for EMC to significantly expand our presence in China, a vibrant and very important market, and extend it to other parts of the world over time,” Joe Tucci, chairman and CEO of EMC, wrote in a statement when the joint venture was first announced in August. “Lenovo has clearly demonstrated its ability to apply its considerable resources and expertise not only to enter, but to lead major market segments.” Lenovo isn’t EMC’s only big project at the moment: the company is working with its VMware subsidiary to spin out collective data-analytics and cloud applications into a separate entity known as the Pivotal Initiative, which will be headed by EMC chief strategy officer Paul Maritz. That process is expected to finish up in the second quarter of 2013, according to EMC, and will involve resources and employees from EMC’s Greenplum and Pivotal Labs organizations; VMware will contribute its vFabric, Cloud Foundry and Cetas units. EMC has paired with other entities on Big Data initiatives. In September it announced a partnership with Alpine Data Labs, for example, that would integrate the latter’s predictive-analytics platform with the Greenplum analytics platform; it’s also paired with Attunity over a data-replication solution for Greenplum.   Image: dotshock/Shutterstock.com