Storage solutions maker EMC has taken its latest, and rather significant step towards the cloud. The company introduced  a hybrid cloud version of three enterprise applications customers would otherwise have to run on-premise, according to an announcement that went out today at the Momentum conference in Berlin.

The suite has been named EMC OnDemand, and the first three apps made available on an as-a-service basis are Captiva, Document Sciences and Documentum; a part of EMC’s enterprise content management (ECM) portfolio that is used by customers to optimize their inbound and outbound administration  of text files.  Now that these programs are available via EMC’s hybrid cloud, companies can further drive down costs by avoiding having to invest in on-site IT infrastructure to power organization-wide deployments.

“OnDemand should dramatically accelerate new application delivery and reduce implementation costs for EMC’s customers. We think this could significantly change the total cost of ownership (TCO) equation for EMC’s Information Intelligence Group products, and give EMC an important competitive advantage,” said Melissa Webster, Program Vice President for research firm IDC.

EMC is using VMware virtualization software and RSA security components to power the OnDemand, which will be expanded to include other applications as well in sometime in the future.

Chief executive Joe Tucci lectured about how it takes an aggressive strategy to become successful in the IT business during a keynote at the University of Washington, an approach that seemed to have paid off for his company.  A part of this offense game is investing a lot in in-house R&D, according to Tucci, something EMC evidently pushed on with since its latest earnings call.  The company reported an 18 percent rise in 3Q2011 revenue to $4.98 billion, and a net profit of $606 million or 28 percent more than last year.