HP and Microsoft have entered into a three-year agreement to invest $250 million to significantly simplify technology environments for businesses of all sizes.

The companies plan to deliver new solutions that will be built on a next-generation infrastructure-to-application model, advance cloud computing by speeding application implementation and eliminate complexities of IT management and automate existing manual processes to lower the overall costs.

This 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.

With this strategic partnership, HP and Microsoft will collaborate on an engineering roadmap for data management machines; converged, prepackaged application solutions; comprehensive virtualization offerings; and integrated management tools.

“The HP and Microsoft collaboration will bring combined products and services to market that will transform the way small business customers look at technology and large organizations manage their IT infrastructure,” said John Hoonhout, managing director and enterprise business lead, HP Middle East.

“In the Middle East, we aim to simplify the datacenter with solutions that will allow our customers to increase business efficiency, lowers total cost of ownership, and speed time to business value,” he added.

The new infrastructure-to-application model from HP and Microsoft will be delivered as integrated offerings for large, heterogeneous data center environments as well as through solutions designed for small and midsize businesses.

Solutions are available immediately, with new offerings being introduced throughout the next three years.

“The Microsoft and HP partnership will help customers in the Middle East achieve better business results, manage their IT infrastructure more efficiently and gain better returns on their technology investments,” said Charbel Fakhoury, general manager, Microsoft Gulf.

“These combined offerings of hardware and software and services have the potential to reshape the workplace and deliver dramatic benefits to the enterprise that will enable them to build profitable relationships with customers, spearhead new innovations and drive business success.”

Driving opportunity for HP and Microsoft Frontline channel partners worldwide:
Under the terms of the expanded partnership, the two companies will increase their global investment by 10 times 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.

Through more than 11,000 Microsoft-certified HP professionals worldwide, HP Services, in partnership with Microsoft Services, will support the entire integrated hardware and software solution from simple implementations to the most critical enterprise infrastructure. – TradeArabia News Service