This morning EMC and Capgemini released a joint announcement, revealing details on their extended partnership with a new cloud initiative in Brazil.  The consultancy is opening up a dedicated business that will collaborate with EMC to deliver as-a-service solutions “designed for specific vertical market segments” to local businesses.

The portfolio will include storage-, archive- and backup-as-a-service, as well as three “transformational” services: SAPaaS, testing platform-as-a-service, and a hosted enterprise CMS solution.

There are two reasons EMC chose a European firm to help penetrate the South American cloud services market, with the first and most important reason being Capgemini’s size.  It is currently the fourth largest service provider in Brazil. The other factor is the ongoing relationship these two companies have, working together since 2002.  Extending an existing relationship is more convenient than starting from scratch with a firm that has not been given an opportunity to verify its credibility. Wikibon co-founder and Chief Analyst Dave Vellante gave us the full story on the motives behind the firms’ latest collaboration in an interview this morning on our NewsDesk show with Kristin Feledy.

“Brazil is very high growth. If you look at the cloud services market space in particular in Brazil it’s a very fast growing market…probably in the 70-80 percent range compound over the next 5-6 years,” Vellante said. “This will be a billion and a half to two billion market in 2016-2017. That’s point number one – the second is that EMC and Capgemini are building pipeline…and demonstrating their commitment to Brazil.”

Vellante also makes a third point: that Capgemini and EMC are both trying to differentiate themselves from their peers. The consultancy has to compete with Accenture and Deloitte, while EMC is trading blows with rivals in its core markets as well as providers such as AWS. Amazon is actively trying to deposition traditional data center vendors, but Joe Tucci is having none of it.

AWS is by far the most widely-used cloud service among developers and small businesses, but enterprise adoption has been slow. Vellante has also provided a detailed analysis on why that is the case, and how competitors can exploit the cloud giant’s Achilles’ heel.