HPE insists channel not as risk as it cosies up to Microsoft

New partnership allows HPE to become Microsoft services reseller

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Microsoft have insisted the new hybrid cloud partnership they announced today will not see them compete with their partners.

At HPE Discover today in London, HPE - one of the new companies formed after HP split last month - formally announced an extended partnership with Microsoft around hybrid cloud.

The pair - which are long-term partners in other IT areas such as PCs - have teamed up to offer hybrid cloud tech through Microsoft Azure. The agreement will see Azure become a preferred public cloud partner for HPE customers, while HPE will be a preferred partner in providing infrastructure and services for Microsoft's hybrid cloud offerings.

The two will work together on engineering and services in a bid to help customers adapt to changing IT business models.

HPE chief executive Meg Whitman talked about the tie up when unveiling her company results last week, but the announcement was made formal today at the event - HPE's first as a standalone company.

The partnership will allow HPE to become a reseller of all first-party services from Microsoft, the pair claimed today, adding that "more and more" HP Software will be added to the Azure Marketplace as a result too.

In a media Q&A session, HPE and Microsoft insisted that their joint partners would not lose out in light of the tie up.

Garth Fort, Microsoft's general manager for cloud and enterprise, said the opposite would actually be the case.

"Today we've got 31,000 joint channel partners which are shared between Microsoft and HP," he said. "In a simple way, I think this is reaffirming the commitment to those 31,000 shared channel partners.

"We ensure we are doing the engineering work up front to ensure the systems that come from a combined Microsoft and HP have a lot of the complexity taken out. This is about simplifying how our joint channel partners can sell and go to market with services from Microsoft along with services and hardware from HP."

HPE's senior vice president for HPE Cloud Bill Hilf agreed and said: "We've always had a mix of direct and indirect in all of our business. That balance is nothing really new for Hewlett Packard, and as Garth mentioned, 31,000 joint channel partners - that is a huge ecosystem. Huge.

"We've been working with these partners for years both on the PC side, servers and storage. So it is something we know how to do together as companies."