HP and Microsoft: Partners to benefit from $250m tie-up

"Groundbreaking" engineering partnership will have implications for resellers too, duo stress

Hurd: We are investing $250m incremental to this programme

HP and Microsoft claim resellers will reap the benefits of their " groundbreaking" $250m (£154m) engineering tie-up.

The duo today unveiled a three-year partnership designed to simplify technology environments for joint customers.

They will join forces on an engineering road map for data management machines, converged, pre-packaged application solutions, virtualisation offerings and integrated management tools.

HP and Microsoft have already carried out limited integration between their channels – in 2008 launching a joint channel certification, Frontline.

The pair claimed the expanded partnership would see them increase their global investment by 10 times to drive new opportunities for 32,000 Frontline partners.

They claim partners will benefit from the tie-up in the following ways:

• Flexible financing options through HP Financial Services

• Increased support with dedicated field resources focused on pre-sales initiatives and extensive partner training

• Jointly funded worldwide marketing campaigns, lead-generation programmes and sales tools

On a conference call, HP chief executive Mark Hurd said that although the two firms have a 25-year history of partnering, the new intiative should not be taken lightly.

“We are investing $250m incremental to this programme of alignment between engineering teams, services teams and go-to-market teams… to get to deeper levels of integration.”

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said: “This agreement, which spans hardware, software and services, will enable business customers to optimise performance with push-button simplicity at the lowest possible total cost of ownership.”