HP Enterprise Services and Microsoft have joined forces to offer global public and private cloud services, a four-year deal that will offer packaged bundles of HP and Microsoft gear and through which HP will resell Microsoft Office 365.
The two tech titans said the goal of the pact is to bring customers into the cloud and help them make the shift from capital IT expenses to operational expenses.
For private cloud deployments, HP will offer Microsoft cloud productivity applications like Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and Microsoft Lync Server 2010 as a service from HP data centers as part of HP Enterprise's cloud services messaging, collaboration and real-time collaboration.
For public cloud, Microsoft will offer Microsoft Office 365 and other collaboration and productivity tools. HP will also resell Microsoft Office 365 with the same cloud services tools on hybrid cloud.
HP and Microsoft will also share engineering resources to collaborate to deploy, support and enhance the joint solutions. Initial availability is expected this month in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia.
"This alliance with HP not only broadens Microsoft's geographic reach, it gives customers maximum flexibility to choose a cloud computing solution that meets their organisation's specialised messaging and collaboration needs," said Microsoft's enterprise partner vice president Mark Hill.
The two companies have teamed up in the past for cloud computing initiatives. In early 2010 HP was revealed as one of the inaugural partners for Microsoft's Windows Azure platform appliance, a private cloud box with public cloud attributes. The agreement would have Windows Azure platforms hosted in HP data centres. To date, that partnership hasn't come to fruition.
In 2010 the two also launched a new technology stack collaboration for the data centre into which both vowed to pump $250 million over three-years with cloud computing as a major focus. The framework integrated Microsoft gear like Exchange Server, SQL Server and Hyper-V with HP's server, storage and networking hardware.
This article originally appeared at crn.com
Issue: 315 | May 2013
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