Microsoft's $250 million collaboration with HP is set to benefit about 10 000 channel distributors in SA.
The deal, the largest to date in the companies' 25-year partnership, will also see some of the $250 million coming into SA in the form of marketing spend, skills development, and research and development investment.
The world's largest software company and the world's biggest technology supplier announced the partnership internationally during a teleconference last night.
The three-year agreement is aimed at advancing cloud computing and will see Microsoft software embedded in HP hardware. “This is entirely cloud motivated,” notes Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
Ballmer says the agreement extends the working relationship that already exists between the companies and will take cloud computing to the next level. “We two companies, HP and Microsoft, are very directed at the cloud as being the driving force behind this deal.”
Plugging in
The partners expect the deal to provide improved application performance, reliability and availability for applications such as Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SQL Server. It will do this by creating a deeply optimised “machine” environment, which will be achieved through turnkey, pre-integrated server, storage, networking and application packages.
The pair will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform, with HP and Microsoft offering services, and Microsoft continuing to invest in HP hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.
Biggest yet
The companies claim the agreement represents the industry's most comprehensive technology stack integration to date - from infrastructure to application - and is intended to substantially improve the customer experience for developing, deploying and managing IT environments.
HP and Microsoft will collaborate on an engineering roadmap for data management machines, converged, pre-packaged application solutions, comprehensive virtualisation offerings, and integrated management tools.
Under the terms of the expanded partnership, the organisations will increase their global investment tenfold to drive new opportunities for the 32 000 HP and Microsoft Frontline channel partners.
Partners will support customers in modernising their environments through a combination of software and hardware infrastructure-to-application packages and services.
Local benefits
Desmond Nair, server and tools business group head at Microsoft SA, says the partnership will benefit the partners' distribution channel in SA. The company, which has a tiered distribution channel, expects about 10 000 local partners to gain from the agreement.
About half of these partners collaborate with both HP and Microsoft. Nair explains that the deal will also see skills coming into SA.
Manoj Bhoola, enterprise storage, servers and networking country manager of HP SA's enterprise business, says Microsoft and HP will inject money into aspects such as marketing, training, research and development, and laboratories.
In addition, Bhoola adds, the agreement has come at a time when cloud computing, virtualisation and data centres are seen as huge growth areas for both companies.
Nair explains that, although SA's bandwidth has previously been inhibitive, this is changing, which will bolster growth in virtualisation and cloud computing. Companies are also moving to internal data centre structures, from which the agreement will benefit.
The local companies are working on a go-to-market plan, and preconfigured software on boxes will start becoming available in the next few months.
Done before
This is not the first deal of its kind HP has inked. The company has a similar arrangement in place with Citrix and VMware.
Last year, Citrix Systems said it had embedded its XenServer hypervisor into HP's ProLiant servers, in a bid to challenge competitor VMware.
Bhoola says, however, that the Microsoft deal is bigger in scope, and both VMware and Citrix will continue to be HP partners. He explains that VMware and Citrix's offerings complement the Microsoft deal as they offer different solutions.
VMware previously noted that HP is likely to become its biggest competitor. This deal could be the start of that process.
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