HP-Microsoft Partnership – IT Management

On 13 January 2010, Microsoft and HP announced they are partnering and jointly investing $250 million over a three-year period to provide management for the "IT stack" from infrastructure to application. They plan to create and sell solutions based on Microsoft applications, preinstalled and pre-configured on HP's Blade System Matrix, which offers a unified data center fabric (UDCF) and Microsoft HyperV. The companies agree to provide bidirectional integration of management software to aid simplification of the combined HP/Microsoft offerings.

The Microsoft/HP partnership may be seen as an alternative to the EMC, VMware and Cisco partnership to deliver the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE). In comparison to VCE, Microsoft’s and HP’s announcement is less disruptive to existing infrastructure investments and embraces the management of Microsoft applications. To sum it up, this agreement represents very comprehensive end-to-end integrated technology stack across hardware and software -- from infrastructure to application.

It could help strengthen H-P in its competition with chief rival IBM. H-P has been clashing more frequently with the tech giant since it acquired technology-services firm Electronic Data Systems in 2008. That deal bulked up H-P portfolio of corporate tech-services contracts. But IBM has a wider array of software for corporate buyers than H-P does. By solidifying its relationship with Microsoft, H-P may be able to broaden the data-center software it now sells.

EMC is the majority owner of VMWare Inc., which makes software used to make data centers operate more efficiently. With the new Microsoft deal, H-P says it now will use Microsoft's competing software.

Similarly, H-P will package Microsoft's database with its hardware as it once did with Oracle's software. That agreement ended after Oracle moved to acquire Sun. Under its deal with Microsoft, H-P will make a similar machine running Microsoft's database software.