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Microsoft and HP today announced that they are expanding their partnership, aiming to provide an integrated full-stack solution for enterprises that will include both hardware and software, designed and pre-tested to support private clouds in customers’ data centers.
“We’re talking about the server, the network, the storage, through the operating system, all the way up to the application,” Dave Donatelli, EVP and GM of HP’s Enterprise Servers and Networking business, said in a conference call this morning.
The solution will be pre-made, tested and shipped with Microsoft applications like SQL Server or Exchange.
This is an expansion of an already long and close partnership between the two companies on many levels. The two giants are investing “$250 million in incremental dollars” into the program to align their engineering and services teams that will work on the new joint solutions, HP CEO Mark Hurd said.
Steve Ballmer, Hurd’s counterpart at Microsoft, said about the solution whose launch date was not announced: “I think about it as the private-cloud version of Windows Azure.” Azure is Microsoft’s offering of IT capacity sold as a cloud-based service.
This is the latest example in the trend of companies pushing to provide as full of an enterprise IT solution as possible. Most recent previous announcement of a similar alliance was made by Cisco and EMC in November, when the two companies said they would provide a pre-made solution that combines Cisco’s Unified Computing System with EMC storage hardware and VMware’s virtualization platform.
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Keywords: HP, Microsoft, cloud, data center, server, storage, networking, partnership, Mark Hurd, Steve Ballmer, azure, engineering, | |
