HP, Microsoft hook up to snare SMBs

Tech giants ink $180m deal in storage, comms, software jamboree

Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft have inked a multi-million-dollar partnership to dish up integrated unified communications and collaboration software over the next four years.

The tie-up was announced today at Interop Las Vegas 2009. Both tech giants plan to shell out $180m in product development, professional services and joint sales and marketing from the venture.

HP and Microsoft said products and services that come out of the initiative would be sold through each firm’s usual channels.

The deal is an extension of HP and Microsoft’s Frontline Partnership, which the companies have had for over two decades. The alliance was first formed to allow the vendors to punt their wares to the enterprise market.

HP and Microsoft will team up on products and services development across MS Office SharePoint Server, MS Exchange Server, MS Office Communications Server (OCS) and HP ProCurve networking products.

Additonally, the partnership will offer “end point interoperability” with HP Halo Telepresence Solutions and OCS-based inified conferencing.

HP said that, as part of the new initiative inked with Microsoft, it has now shifted Halo into its ProCurve division.

Both companies will launch a full set of biz productivity services including architecture planning and design, monitoring, management and support for software, hardware, network, server, storage and infrastructure components in the shared portfolio.

HP has groomed a global team of service bods to support the partnership. The firms will also be attempting to woo small and medium-sized businesses with their UC and collaboration services. ®