HP, Microsoft to expand alliance

New Delhi: HP and Microsoft announced a four-year strategic global initiative to deliver an end-to-end unified communications and collaboration solution.

As part of their Frontline Partnership, the two companies expect to invest up to an additional $180 million in product development, professional services, as well as joint sales and marketing, to help organizations lower costs and improve productivity.

The solution, which is planned to span software, hardware, networking and services, would enable customers to improve business output and reduce travel, telecom and IT operating costs. This would be accomplished by streamlining communications across messaging, video and voice with connected applications and devices. HP and Microsoft also plan to provide the flexibility and control customers need to manage their communications infrastructure efficiently.

“Customers can lower costs and rapidly enhance employee productivity with unified communications and collaboration from HP and Microsoft,” said Ann Livermore, Executive VP-Technology Solutions Group, HP. “We provide customers with solutions that are rich, intuitive and accessible from anywhere on nearly any device.”

“Together, we are offering the extensive breadth of capabilities of our respective technologies to deliver a truly unified communications and collaboration solution to help our customers improve business productivity,” said Stephen Elop, President-Business Division, Microsoft. “This means one click to communicate, one click to conference, one click to collaborate.”

The two companies will form joint teams to collaborate on products and services development across Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Office Communications Server, as well as HP ProCurve networking products. HP will obtain Microsoft Unified Communications qualification for the HP dx9000 TouchSmart Business PC and select smartphones. HP Business Technology Optimization (BTO) software will provide additional support for Microsoft Office Communications Server, including the ability to provide real-time quality of service metrics for the voice and video network over the IP infrastructure.

Microsoft and HP will offer a full set of business productivity services ranging from assessment, architecture planning and design to implementation, monitoring, management and support for software, hardware, network, server, storage and infrastructure components in the shared portfolio. Additionally, HP will dedicate a global team of service professionals to support the joint solutions, helping customers achieve improved levels of network availability and response times. Moreover, HP and Microsoft will also target communications service providers, offering them the same technologies and services to enable hosted unified communications and collaboration services for SMBs.