Microsoft and HP Agree to invest $250 Million to Simplify Technology Environments

Last Tuesday, January 13, 2010, Microsoft and HP announced an agreement to invest $250 Million over the next three years to significantly simplify technology environments.  This is not something that is just targeted at the large enterprises but meant to benefit businesses of all sizes!  Here’s the announcement: https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/jan10/01-13inftoapppr.mspx.

I’m sure some of you are wondering why I’m posting about this here and why I care.  That is a great question so let me answer it.  :-)

The agreement includes investments in Exchange and turnkey solutions for the cloud environment.  Here’s the snippet from the announcement:

Improved application performance, reliability and availability for some of the industry’s top business applications including Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SQL Server, by creating a deeply optimized “machine” environment. This is achieved through turnkey, pre-integrated server, storage, networking and application packages. These data management and e-mail machines provide “push-button” simplicity in deployment and management.

Of course, it’s not just the Exchange piece, but the entire package that will help make things more simple.  When you couple the management tools from both Microsoft and HP to remotely manage and monitor the environment as well as “plug and play” deployments, there is definitely a lot to be hopeful about. 

Since the announcement was just made and the details and engineering work still need to be hammered out, I don’t have any insights on the specific solutions that will hit the market, but I am definitely going to keep my eye out.  I just wanted to make sure you saw this and know that Microsoft is serious about the cloud environment and how Exchange fits into the architecture.

Harold Wong