PC giant Dell and content management specialist EMC have announced that will extend their partnership, which has seen the firms sell jointly-branded networked storage systems to over 10,000 customers worldwide.

The firms will extend their global alliance for a further five years, until 2011. Since 2001, Dell and EMC have rolled out three complete product refreshes, helping EMC become the mid-tier leader in terms of revenue with 21 percent of the market.

Speaking at Dell’s Technology Day press event in New York this week (12 September), EMC chief executive Joseph Tucci said, “This has been the most successful partnership of its kind probably in the history of the IT industry – we’ve just scratched the surface and have a tremendous opportunity.”

The firms have gradually expanded their offerings to include storage management, backup and replication software over the last five years, and released the first networked storage system to cost under $5,000 (£2,670).

Tucci argued that the success of the alliance was due to good engineering, marketing and customer service.