Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft will jointly offer private and public cloud solutions for organizations under a newly
announced four-year initiative.
Those solutions will break down into three
separate verticals: “Private Cloud,” involving a combination of HP Enterprise
Cloud Services and Microsoft cloud products—including Microsoft Exchange Server
2010, SharePoint Server 2010 and Lync Server 2010—delivered via HP data centers;
“Public Cloud,” primarily Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud-productivity software;
and a “Hybrid Solution” wherein HP resells Office 365 with HP Enterprise Cloud
Services.
The platforms will first become available
this month in certain major markets, including the United States, the United
Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
“This alliance not only broadens
Microsoft’s geographic reach,” Mark Hill, vice president of Microsoft’s
Enterprise Server Group, wrote in a Dec. 8 statement, “it gives customers
maximum flexibility to choose a cloud computing solution that meets their
organization’s specialized messaging and collaboration needs.”
Under former CEO Leo Apotheker, HP began
reshaping itself as an enterprise-services company. In August, he announced that
HP would acquire U.K.-based Autonomy, an enterprise-IT provider, for around $10
billion. At the same time, he indicated that the company’s PC manufacturing
division was under consideration for a possible spin-off.
Current CEO Meg Whitman later decided to
keep that manufacturing division in-house, but HP nonetheless continues to drive
forward in the area of enterprise IT services. Certainly, it has no choice:
rivals such as Oracle have made no secret of their determination to dominate
that increasingly lucrative area by any means necessary.
Microsoft has also been making its own
determined cloud push, with a raft of new services, including Office 365 and
Windows Azure. These represent Microsoft’s attempts to expand its revenue base
beyond traditional, desktop-bound software such as Windows and Office.
Related articles
- HP and Microsoft Deliver Global Communications and Collaboration Sol.. (nieuwsbank.nl)
- Microsoft, HP unveil joint cloud offering (infoworld.com)
