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Needless to say when I read this I got VERY excited especially the part about System Center. Below is the official HP Press Release, followed by the post from the Microsoft News Center (where you can watch videos from Steve Ballmer and Mike Hurd giving more details), and finally Brad Anderson’s (Corporate Vice President, Management and Services and Division at Microsoft) thoughts on this announcements.
World’s largest technology company and No. 1 software provider plan to advance cloud computing with industry’s most integrated technology stack
PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 13, 2010
HP and Microsoft Corp. today announced a three-year agreement to invest $250 million to significantly simplify technology environments for businesses of all sizes.
The companies plan to deliver new solutions that will:
This agreement represents the industry’s most comprehensive technology stack integration to date – from infrastructure to application – and is intended to substantially improve the customer experience for developing, deploying and managing IT environments.
With this strategic partnership, HP and Microsoft will collaborate on an engineering roadmap for data management machines; converged, prepackaged application solutions; comprehensive virtualization offerings; and integrated management tools. Delivered through the industry’s most extensive sales and partner network, these dynamic IT solutions will provide:
“Driving innovation helps businesses establish a competitive advantage,” said Mark Hurd, HP chairman and chief executive officer. “This collaboration will allow HP and Microsoft to offer our customers transformative technology that will reduce costs, generate business growth and accelerate innovation.”
The new infrastructure-to-application model from HP and Microsoft will be delivered as integrated offerings for large, heterogeneous data center environments as well as through solutions designed for small and midsize businesses. Solutions are available immediately, with new offerings being introduced throughout the next three years.
“This agreement, which spans hardware, software and services, will enable business customers to optimize performance with push-button simplicity at the lowest-possible total cost of ownership,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer, Microsoft Corp. “Our extended partnership will transform the way large enterprises deliver services to their customers, and help smaller organizations adopt IT to grow their businesses. Microsoft and HP are betting on each other so our customers don’t have to gamble on IT.”
Driving opportunity for HP and Microsoft Frontline channel partners worldwide
Under the terms of the expanded partnership, the two companies will increase their global investment by 10 times to drive new opportunities for the 32,000 HP and Microsoft Frontline channel partners. Partners will support customers in modernizing their environments through a combination of software and hardware infrastructure-to-application packages and services. Partner benefits include:
Driving customer success with HP professional services and Microsoft Services
To speed return on investment (ROI) and increase business value, the integrated portfolio is complemented by new design, implementation and support services for the joint solutions. Through more than 11,000 Microsoft-certified HP professionals worldwide, HP Services, in partnership with Microsoft Services, will support the entire integrated hardware and software solution from simple implementations to the most critical enterprise infrastructure. Service offerings include:
More information about the HP and Microsoft agreement is available at www.hp.com/go/microsoft/infra2apps.
Microsoft and HP executives will discuss this announcement during a public audio teleconference today at 11:15 a.m. ET. Interested parties can listen to the audio teleconference by visiting http://hpbroadband.com/program.aspx?key=SKPNSKDIKG. Interested parties can participate in the audio teleconference by calling +1 800 369 1191 (U.S., toll-free) or +1 212 519 0829 (international, toll). The passcode is 3022632.
The teleconference replay and other media materials are available at www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/infrastructure/ and www.hp.com/go/HPMSFTalliance.
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
About HP
HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world’s largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure to solve customer problems. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com/.
Top Executives Discuss New Agreement Jan. 13 Watch Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, HP chairman and CEO Mark Hurd, and other executives discuss today’s agreement to simplify technology environments for businesses of all sizes.
Video: Watch Microsoft and HP executives discuss the agreement
Today Microsoft and HP announced some great news for customers and partners of our infrastructure software and server applications: a $250 million engineering, sales and services partnership to advance cloud computing and help customers better use IT for business success. You can read the press release and watch videos of executives commenting on the agreement here.
This is a broad, far-reaching agreement with a range of components, building on our 25-year partnership with HP and ongoing efforts to deliver what we call Dynamic IT. As one of the main architects of the agreement, I wanted to provide some insights about what it means for customers and partners.
This is clearly a big commitment on our part. Overall, our intent is to deliver no less than a next-generation computing platform. The goal is to lead the adoption of cloud computing while helping companies realize immediate business benefits through IT. With this partnership the two companies are working toward new models for application delivery, hardware architecture and IT operations.
Together HP and Microsoft will deliver a deeply integrated IT stack for business applications. We are driving architectural innovation that connects IT infrastructure to applications for better performance, reliability and availability of the industry’s top business applications with push-button simplicity – all at a lower cost of ownership than ever before.
For example, pre-integrated hardware, software and application solutions, based on HP Converged Infrastructure and optimized for Microsoft Exchange 2010, will help customers boost employee productivity and protect sensitive information at a lower cost per mailbox.
Key to this deal is integrating virtualization and systems management across heterogeneous datacenter and cloud environments. Seamless management for both physical and virtualized systems will provide automatic provisioning, power management and self-tuning, which together will help customers streamline the deployment of new business capabilities across their companies.
For example, we’re integrating HP’s Insight Software and Business Technology Optimization software portfolio with Microsoft’s System Center suite. That will enable customers to uniformly manage virtualized IT services in mixed datacenter environments, which will dramatically simplify management for administrators and increases their contribution to the business.
We’re excited about our joint engineering roadmap and commitment to innovation for both today and the future. I feel strongly that this partnership will give customers the confidence to deploy new business solutions using IT they already have in place, and take advantage of the new world of private and public cloud resources. Case in point: HP and Microsoft will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform, with HP offering services and Microsoft continuing to invest in HP hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.
The partnership also entails big investments in HP Technology Services and Microsoft Services to provide design, implementation and support for our joint technologies. And we are increasing our joint investment in our HP/Microsoft Frontline channel partner network by 10 times, empowering partners to help customers implement and manage the solutions.
This is a big day for Microsoft and HP. More importantly, it represents the beginning of a new period of opportunity and possibilities for customers and partners worldwide.
Read the complete post at http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/cliffs_blog/archive/2010/01/13/news-hp-and-microsoft-simplify-technology-environments-with-solutions-built-on-new-infrastructure-to-application-model.aspx