HP and Microsoft have announced a three-year agreement to invest $250m, under which the companies plan to deliver new offerings that will be built on an infrastructure-to-application model; advance cloud computing by speeding application implementation; and eliminate complexities of IT management and automate existing manual processes.
The agreement represents the technology stack integration, from infrastructure to application, and is intended to enhance the customer experience for developing, deploying and managing IT environments, the companies said.
Under the strategic partnership, the companies will collaborate on an engineering roadmap for data management machines; converged, prepackaged application offerings; virtualisation offerings; and integrated management tools.
The companies claim that the new IT offerings will enhance business efficiency and improve application performance for business applications including Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SQL Server.
In addition, the offerings will also provide enhanced operations through integrated, interoperable virtualisation and management tools that allow technology environments to be automatically provisioned, managed and self-tuned; and investment protection.
Through the integration of HP Insight Software, HP Business Technology Optimization software and Microsoft System Center, enterprise customers use a unified management offering to automate application deployment along with infrastructure-to-application monitoring, the companies said.
Both the companies will also collaborate on the Windows Azure platform with HP and Microsoft offering services and Microsoft continuing to invest in HP hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.
Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft, said: “This agreement, which spans hardware, software and services, will enable business customers to optimise performance with push-button simplicity at the lowest-possible total cost of ownership.
Our extended partnership will transform the way large enterprises deliver services to their customers, and help smaller organisations adopt IT to grow their businesses. Microsoft and HP are betting on each other so our customers don’t have to gamble on IT.”
