HP Works with Microsoft Towards Simpler Business Technology Environments

HP has announced that it is teaming up with Microsoft in order to develop ways to simplify business work environments. The two will invest $250 million towards developing a new infrastructure-to-application model, which will be delivered as solutions for small and medium businesses as well as integrated offerings for heterogeneous data-center environments. The end-result will be dynamic IT solutions capable of increasing the business efficiency, improve application performance and reliability, as well as enhance operation while maintaining a low cost of ownership.

The new solutions will lower overall costs by eliminating complexities of IT management and automating manual processes. In addition, application implementation will be done faster, advancing cloud computing. The joint solutions are designed to utilize existing data-center investments and manage them through a common framework. HP will receive investments from Microsoft and will collaborate with it on the Windows Azure platform, which will combine services from both partners.

“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,” Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer, Microsoft Corp., said. “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.”

Under the expanded partnership, HP, like Microsoft, will increase its global investment by ten times. Their 32,000 Frontline channel partners will assist in the modernization of customers' technological environments through combined hardware and software infrastructure-to-application packages and services. For example, financing options will be provided by HP Financial Services, which enables resellers to make technology more accessible and easy to acquire, thus encouraging adoption by customers. The joint endeavor will also shorten sales cycles, fund marketing campaigns and increase support with dedicated field resources focused on presale initiatives and extensive partner training.

“Driving innovation helps businesses establish a competitive advantage,” Mark Hurd, HP chairman and chief executive officer, added. “This collaboration will allow HP and Microsoft to offer our customers transformative technology that will reduce costs, generate business growth and accelerate innovation.”

Those interested in further details on this agreement may visit the special section of HP's official website.