This morning, Microsoft and HP announced a three-year, worldwide agreement to invest $250 million to significantly simplify IT environments through a wide range of converged hardware, software and professional services solutions. The joint engineering, sales, marketing and services are designed to advance enterprise customers’ transition to cloud computing by speeding application implementation, eliminating management complexities and automating manual processes to lower the overall costs of IT.

HP and Microsoft will collaborate on joint roadmap development and engineering of application platform solutions, integrated systems management and virtualization offerings, all delivered through the industry’s largest sales and partner network. The two companies will increase their channel partner investment by 10x globally to drive new opportunities for 32,000 HP and Microsoft Frontline channel partners. 

Some of these Partner benefits include:

• Quicker time to revenue
• Flexible financing options
• Increased support
• Jointly funded worldwide marketing campaigns

Here is the link to more information about this exciting announcement, including:

• Press release about this announcement
• Executive videos available on the Virtual Press Room from:
  • Steve Ballmer
  • Mark Hurd
  • Bob Muglia and David Donatelli
  • Ross Brown, VP of worldwide partner sales, Microsoft, and Frank Rauch, vice president, HP  enterprise servers, storage and networking channel sales
• Message from Allison Watson to Partners on today's announcement
• And more…

Also, you can hear the replay of the Microsoft and HP executive’s audio teleconference about this announcement here.

As always, you can find information on the Microsoft News Center website about not only this announcement, but other Microsoft news related items.

Thank you and have a wonderful day,

Eric Ligman – Follow me on TWITTER and RSS
Global Partner Experience Lead
Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights