Monday, Hewlett-Packard Co., or HP (HPQ) said that it has signed a three year agreement with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) to invest $250 million to significantly simplify technology environments for businesses of all sizes.
Palo Alto, California-based HP stated that both 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.
The agreement covers hardware, software and services, is expected to allow business customers to optimize performance with ease at the lowest-possible total cost of ownership. The two companies believe that the extended partnership would transform the way large enterprises deliver services to customers, and help smaller organizations adopt IT to grow their businesses.
The new infrastructure-to-application model will be delivered as integrated offerings for large, heterogeneous data center environments as well as through solutions designed for small and midsize businesses.
The terms of the expanded partnership indicate 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. HP said that the integrated portfolio is complemented by new design, implementation and support services for the joint solutions to speed return on investment.
With the 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 IT solutions delivered is expected to provide increased business efficiency through solutions that respond to changing business requirements by seamlessly converging server, storage, network and application resources in a highly automated, self-managed environment.
HP and Microsoft will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform, with HP and Microsoft offering services, and Microsoft continuing to invest in HP hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.
HPQ is currently trading at $51.88, down $0.09 or 0.17% on a volume of 5.22 million shares on the NYSE. MSFT is currently up 0.28 or 0.93%, trading at $30.35, on a volume of 20.62 million shares on the Nasdaq.
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