Lewis said EMC has no plans to join the group.

Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group Inc. in Milford, Mass., said IBM"s creation of Aperi is a snub of Hewlett-Packard Co. because it purchased storage resource management vendor AppIQ Inc. in September. It"s also a snub of EMC, "just because they wanted to snub EMC," he said.

A spokesman for HP couldn"t be reached for comment at deadline.

AppIQ still has reseller pacts with HP rivals EMC, IBM, Hitachi Data Systems Corp. and Network Appliance because, just as Aperi hopes to do, each vendor needs the AppIQ technology to interoperate with other vendors" hardware for device discovery, monitoring and application integration.

But Duplessie said the Aperi group is "another motherhood-and-apple-pie feel-good kind of thing" that isn"t likely to succeed.

"Storage management should be a given, but it isn"t," he said. "If the vendors actually participate, users will benefit because being able to manage things will become easy and free. In practice, though, who knows, none of these kinds of things have actually done anything."