Microsoft-HP Partnership Challenges IBM

The release of four new appliances, which includes business intelligence and data warehousing products, sees both companies focusing on deployments and systems maintenance, or rather than pricing, and offers an integrated stack that can compete in any market.

The partnership

When the partnership was announced 12 months ago, both signed into a deal that aimed to invest US$ 250 million in simplifying the IT environments for companies of all sizes and develop products that would be built on a new infrastructure-to-application model, as then as push cloud computing forward by speeding up application implementation.

Optimized for Microsoft SQL Server and SharePoint, this set of business intelligence tools can be installed and configured in less than an hour. It will enable users to share data analyses built with MS PowerPivott for MS Excel and share that content with others across SharePoint 2010.

It as well allows IT to centrally audit, monitor and manage solutions created by end users from a single dashboard and greatly reduces the time and effort it takes for IT to configure and a comprehensive business intelligence solution.

The SMB sector

HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance is aimed at the SMB sector and complements HP’s Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, which is designed for large organizations, optimized for SQL Server 2008 R2 and was introduced in November.

It offers improved data access with massive scalability and faster queries than traditional SQL Server databases. It as well works with MS’s Business Intelligence platform.

It can be deployed in a few hours, delivers large mailboxes at a low cost, centralized archiving and 24/7 access from any device. It can as well scale as business needs grow.

In addition to this, both companies are offering support and consulting services for the converged application appliances to accelerate business service delivery. The services portfolios include assessment, design, proof of concept and implementation, as so then as ongoing support.

The HP Business Decision Appliance

The HP Business Decision Appliance and HP Enterprise Data Warehouse with services and support are available nevertheless, during the HP E5000 Messaging System will be available in March. The HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance is expected to be available in June.