EMC expects to complete the acquisition of VMware next month or in March, providing long-term resources for the three-year-old VMware's highly-rated virtualisation software and giving users a choice between it and a forthcoming product from Microsoft.

The agreement, announced late in December, continues EMC's journey from enterprise storage hardware to a more rounded technology supplier by supplementing the recently completed acquisitions of storage software company Legato Systems and document management software developer Documentum.

While the Legato buy gives EMC better resource management tools for multivendor storage and Documentum helps it offer corporate governance assistance, the VMware deal is a step in a radically new direction. VMware's software can make one server appear as several or many servers appear as one, helping to improve manageability.

The VMware purchase will take EMC head to head with Microsoft, which is expected to offer competing software called Virtual Server later this year.