The dominant position of EMC (ticker symbol EMC) in the storage industry is well established. Not willing to rest on its laurels, however, the company has been transitioning for quite some time, both internally and by strategic acquisitions and partnerships, from being a pure storage hardware vendor to a provider of all things related to storage, data retrieval, and data security. By doing so, it is well positioned as a player in the computing world’s transition to the cloud.

But rather than transform itself into a cloud-service provider, it’s trying to capitalize on the trend by being an important supplier to all the major competitors in the field. An item in today’s Barron’s (barrons.com) reports that this week, at the storage giant’s annual trade show in Las Vegas, EMC is anticipated to make a number of big announcements pushing its cloud agenda. The Hopkinton, Mass., technology outfit is expected to unveil a partner program for companies that provide various computing services distributed over the Internet. It could involve as many as 20 major names, including large telephone carriers and others that offer services for software, infrastructure and platforms, according to an industry source. An EMC spokesperson would not comment on specifics.

The upshot is that EMC wants to maintain a Swiss-like neutrality in the current upheaval within the data center industry. By collaborating with cloud-service providers, EMC hopes to make its storage systems and software products compatible with “private clouds,” networks usually owned and run by corporations, as well as with the “public clouds” often owned by outside service providers, and therefore also servicing the trend in the industry towards a “hybrid” cloud. Data is being generated at such a rapid rate these days—think photos, slides, videos—that storage is a critical need.

At its upcoming trade show next week, EMC will be dropping “private” from its theme and focusing on “hybrid” cloud computing, gearing up for combined usage of private and public clouds in which many companies might be participating. The hybrid approach is the next phase. It’s logical and pragmatic. Corporate IT decision makers have embraced cloud practices more rapidly than expected, largely owing to positive results. The financial crisis and recession helped spur faster acceptance because cloud computing generally allows greater power with higher flexibility and efficiency at lower costs. But very few huge global corporations are going to have solely private or solely public clouds. Most are taking a hybrid approach.

To better accommodate this, EMC is gearing its storage systems and software products to be compatible with various data-center technologies and cloud-computing platforms. This allows for software applications and data workloads to move from private clouds to public clouds more easily. That way, if a service provider crashes, a corporate user can switch its data back to its private cloud or over to another service provider. The recent crash of Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Web-services data centers reminded everyone of the downside to cloud computing and the importance of back-up networks and redundancy.

Investors are rewarding the company’s Swiss-like neutrality and position in the space and its strong performance by marking up the share price. The shares closed the week currently trading at $27.19, down only slightly from their recent 52 week high of $28.73 and up approximately 50% since the time of their trade show last year.