In a joint conference call this morning, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and HP chairman/CEO Mark Hurd announced a significant expansion of their business collaboration. With a three-year commitment to invest an incremental $250 million in their joint engineering, go-to-market, and professional services activities, the two companies have signalled that they will work actively together to build leadership in several key areas, notably in public and private cloud computing.
Highlights of the agreement include:
- A commitment to deliver pre-integrated, turnkey systems based on Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SQL Server, to provide “push button simplicity in deployment and management.”
- Integrated, interoperable virtualization and management tools, spanning Microsoft System Center and Microsoft Hyper-V Server, plus HP’s Insight Software and Business Technology Optimization software.
- Expanded collaboration on the Windows Azure cloud computing platform, particularly in the area of service (as well as in the core infrastructure itself, where Microsoft committed to continued investment in HP platform products).
The cloud aspect of the announcement surfaced repeatedly through the Q&A session. Steve Ballmer noted that “in a sense, this is entirely cloud-motivated,” and later added that both HP and Microsoft are already investing in products and support for public and private cloud infrastructures – and that “now what we need is to glue it together,” ensuring that the products and solutions from the two companies are as easy to deploy (and gain business benefit from) as possible.
