Big news: Microsoft and HP team up to move IT forward

This morning Microsoft and HP announced a three-year, $250 million agreement to jointly deliver a new infrastructure-to-application model, advance cloud computing and generally reduce the costs and complexities of IT.

The press release, executive videos and other information about the agreement are available here.

This is a big commitment on the part of both companies, representing the industry’s most comprehensive technology stack integration to date. There are three main components to the agreement:

· A shared engineering roadmap to ensure strong integration between hardware and software - both on premises and in the cloud.

· Joint solutions to optimize and simplify the deployment, management and health of the datacenter.

· Investment in joint sales, service and channel partner programs

Virtualization is (of course) at the center of the partnership. New solutions based on HP Converged Infrastructure with Microsoft Hyper-V and applications will enable customers to speed up implementation time, reduce unplanned downtime, and lower network/cabling infrastructure costs. And they will help customers deliver service-based infrastructure and the foundation for cloud computing.

Windows Virtualization Team Blog : Big news: Microsoft and HP team up to move IT forward