Analysts from IT Business Edge report on the "Fifth Age of Computing" - the virtual company made up of independent market leading firms.
"EMC, on the other hand, has been driving unique and powerful partnerships in what I'm arguing is the fifth age of computing-one built around the model of a virtual company made up of independent, market-leading firms ""The most powerful example of this new model is the Virtual Computing Environment, or VCE, which is made up of Cisco, EMC, VMware and Intel and has subordinate partners such as BMC.
Together the companies complete a solution set that is in the class of solutions from more traditional companies such as HP and IBM.""Add Lenovo and you suddenly have the virtual capability that closely maps to what IBM had in the late 1990s and may be unmatched today."
(See Analysis: EMC partners with Lenovo to create 'virtual company')