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MicroHP — the New IT Giant?

Posted by Soulskill on from the like-peanut-butter-and-shards-of-glass dept.

storagedude writes "Although it may have gone unnoticed by most IT industry watchers, this week's announcement from Microsoft and HP that the two have combined on integrated appliances for corporate business intelligence and email could be the start of a closer relationship between the two IT giants as they seek to counteract the growing hardware and software dominance of IBM and Oracle. From the article: 'Combine Microsoft and HP — call it MicroHP — and what do you have? A full Windows-plus-Linux scale-out hardware and software lineup, with an exceptionally strong position both in SaaS/public cloud and data centers, and a huge presence on the business desktop. This would allow such a combined entity to produce well-tuned appliances for such hot areas as BI/analytics — as Microsoft and HP have just done.'"

2 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. HP made a similar deal with Oracle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    a couple years back, to sell an appliance running Oracle's DB and data warehousing software on HP server hardware. That was supposed to be a big deal for both companies, until Oracle acquired HP's archrival Sun a few months later. Then Mark Hurd was kicked out of HP and joined Oracle, with Ellison dissing HP's board for its incompetence in letting Hurd go. It might be possible to still buy this Oracle-HP appliance, but I doubt that either company is pushing it very hard.

    In other words, this is the kind of short term marketing alliance that happens all the time in the tech world, usually with lots of hoopla and smiling CEOs making speeches about a new era of this or that. Most of them don't amount to much. In the case of HP and Microsoft, there is perhaps a fit with HP lacking enterprise database software and Microsoft struggling in the business intelligence space. But wait until either one makes an acquisition or another big deal, for example Microsoft with Dell to sell BI appliances, then we'll stop hearing from the two companies about how excellent this one is.

  2. Re:R&D at Microsoft by the+linux+geek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A couple off the top of my head -

    -LINQ
    -Singularity (a managed-code operating system, designed for high reliability)
    -Photosynth
    -Work on robotics
    -Work on application acceleration with FPGA's
    -The F# programming language

    Whether or not you like Microsoft, or qualify these as "breakthroughs," MSR does more public R&D than just about anyone else in the industry with the possible exception of IBM.