By Scott Farrand
Complex data center infrastructures are heightening risks for many organizations, who are struggling with constantly evolving technologies and computing methods. With increasingly heterogeneity, growing virtualization across the data center to the desktop and rising demands for private clouds, organizations are often overwhelmed with their management requirements to keep IT under control. To address these concerns, the need for convergence solutions and simplified management will be stronger than ever this year – and a new year’s resolution for many CIOs.
Significantly expanding on our 25-year Frontline Partnership, HP is working with Microsoft towards a shared vision of eliminating complexity within the data center to help organizations drive faster time to business value. This is the most comprehensive technology alignment in the industry to date, through our unparalleled level of joint investment in engineering, integrated solutions and go-to-market support. The HP team is excited about the journey ahead with Microsoft and the ability to dramatically simplify the use of technology for customers.
This $250 million agreement will enable HP and Microsoft customers to protect current technology investments, while enabling them to leverage next-generation application models that combine on-premise computing with cloud-based services.
As a result of this agreement, the more than 32,000 HP and Microsoft Frontline Partners will benefit from increased business opportunities through a combination of infrastructure and application packages as well as services. The HP and Microsoft Frontline Partnership is based on rigorous focus to understand each other and the segments of the markets we address – which thereby allows us to better understand our customers and their IT challenges. We share long term strategic plans across businesses and regions and have built a shared view of our customers with a top to bottom commitment to offer them technologies at affordable prices that help them run their business.
Teaming up with Microsoft’s leading virtualization solution Hyper-V, HP is building on our converged infrastructure strategy by enabling customers to achieve a business-ready infrastructure that creates the foundation for cloud computing. Our new integrated virtualization solutions will allow businesses to significantly improve server utilization, decrease implementation time and reduce network as well as cabling infrastructure costs. In addition, HP’s Insight Software and Business Technology Optimization solutions are deeply integrated with Microsoft’s System Center suite to offer heterogeneous data center management solutions for virtualization environments that improve administration productivity and simplify management.
For Microsoft Exchange customers, HP and Microsoft will deliver joint solutions based on HP’s converged infrastructure and deliver infrastructure optimized for Microsoft Exchange 2010. These infrastructure solutions will drive higher levels of availability, performance and redundancy at a lower cost per mailbox. Combined with HP professional services, Exchange 2010 upgrades are further simplified with best practice methodology, tools and templates offered globally, speeding deployment while managing risk as well as reducing costs to our customers.
To help customers quickly access the information needed to make critical business decisions, HP will collaborate with Microsoft to develop a comprehensive portfolio of optimized data management solutions and appliances. Along with a full range of professional services, these solutions will ease implementation. Driving faster-time-to-application value, HP is also offering services for application modernization of large scale online transaction processing implementations as well as customized Business Intelligence services. Customers will be able to increase business flexibility and reduce technology costs more than ever before.
Through this alliance, HP will reduce risk and datacenter complexity in the delivery of virtualization, data management and application solutions to our customers.
