Microsoft and HP tie up: What are their motives?

Collaboration between Microsoft and HP is nothing new, but last week’s announced tie-up by the technology giants was touted as “the deepest yet” by Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer on a conference call following the announcement.

Ballmer also stated that $250m and 11,000 HP professionals would be assigned to the initiative, with cross company integration encompassing the whole technology stack – from server, network and storage, up through the operating system to the applications.

Specifics within the announcement were thin on the ground, with some analysts arguing that the tie-up is a PR stunt, and others saying that with technology companies all involved in horizontal partnerships, the announcement of a “special partnership” is itself unusual.

One major reason for the tie-up could be the threat posed to HP and Microsoft by the technology partnership between network giant Cisco, leading storage vendor EMC and virtualisation trailblazer VMware (VEC), established early last year. VEC also has an end-to-end solution spanning hardware and software, and is targeting its virtualisation system for use in a small enterprise, private cloud environment.

With the announcement of Microsoft's cloud platform Windows Azure in December last year, and the platform going live in January, Microsoft is also hungry for market share in the private cloud environment. Clive Longbottom service director for business processes facilitation at analyst firm Quocirca said that this was the most obvious reason for the tie up.

He added: “It’s clear that the collaboration will help Microsoft advance the market share of Azure. But HP’s motive is more mysterious. Why would a big hardware vendor tie itself to one enterprise cloud platform?”

"HP might be betting that Microsoft will continue to be the biggest player as it always has been. You would hope that there was another reason for the announcement, but I for one certainly don’t know what it is.”

“It sends an strange message to the market, why would a company as big as HP need to align with any one company, when there will be a number of other platforms [not just Azure] on the market. It potentially weakens HPs position as a market leader.”

Microsoft’s virtualisation tool, Hyper V cannot easily be used as a standalone product with platforms other than Windows Server 2008, and despite Ballmer’s assertions during the conference call regarding HP’s support for multiple platforms - Windows, Linux, and HP-UX, the announced collaboration will look to tie customers into Microsoft’s package and may unnecessarily tie HP customers down too.

Oracle’s attempted acquisition of Sun could lead to the formation of another player in the market for private cloud systems, with Oracle’s database running on Sun Sparc server hardware.

If the EU’s anti-trust investigation comes down in favour of Oracle in its proposed acquisition of Sun, then the database giant may find it has a trump card in the MySQL database technology it will acquire.

Although MySQL can be used by high-end enterprises, it sits better with small to medium sized firms. As firms transition from being medium-sized operations to larger enterprises, Oracle may feel it would have an ideal opportunity to upgrade firms to its more sophisticated ‘large enterprise’-class database technology.

Microsoft is keeping a beady eye on proceedings here, to, and has recently offered its SQL Server Migration Assistant, for firms who would like to migrate to Microsoft’s own enterprise class database technology, SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008.