Well, just look again. $250 million is a helluva partnership investment, even for giants in the industry. It's always the case that press releases tend to be somewhat "glossy" - frankly, they all sound the same to me - so again, it's easy to overlook the details. Better than the press release, look here, to some of the applications that are already available, some of the case studies that already prove the value of the collaboration, and some of the details of hardware, software and services that are being integrated: http://bit.ly/5VTD4k
From a purely personal viewpoint, I have to say that the people I work with in Microsoft and HP are genuinely excited about the extended partnership. My friend at HP, John Santaferraro has been tweeting like crazy! For us it's not just marketing, and that's particularly true in the database and business intelligence fields. SQL Server is the most rapidly growing database platform, our BI is making strides in the market, and our partners in HP have also made some very compelling business intelligence investments.
So what is it, that we are offering?
For one thing, pre-configured, packaged solutions for OLTP, BI and DW workloads for different sizes of business. For SQL Server, this is great. Today, our customers see the cost-effectiveness, ease-of-use and power of the SQL Server and Microsoft BI platforms, but they often see only that. We are after all a platform company (having, I suspect, more platforms than the Jackson Five.) The new solutions build on the platform with HPs services and hardware experience which are, of course, first class. If this was a just a case of packaging up a services, software and hardware offering to make it easy to market, I think I would be unimpressed myself, but there is more to it. We are developing tools and services specifically for these offerings - from Microsoft, tools to make virtualization easier; from HP, customized BI professional services in information governance, master data management and so on. These professional services from HP are critical - they have over 11,000 certified Microsoft Professionals, so building out a portfolio of service offerings specifically for them, greatly increases our clout.
For the mid-market, I can see some of our other partners being concerned at first reading of the announcement. However, I see good news for them, too. Naturally, the noise has been about the big things HP and Microsoft can do together, even if somewhat exclusively, but the channel remains very important to us. ("Super-important" as Microsoft execs are wont to say.) After all, we have 32000 HP and Microsoft channel partners.
They will see much larger investment in our marketing programs - something like ten times the current spend, I believe. The investment will go into bundled software and hardware packages that should reduce sales cycles, new financing options to make integrated solutions easier to acquire, and - hugely important and hopefully worthy of a cheer - integrated support from dedicated field engineers.
I hope this gives some impression of why we are excited by the announcement. Of course, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, and we'll be watching over the next year and more for the restaurant reviews of this particular dessert to come rolling in. I'm looking forward to them.
Meanwhile, it's time for me to get out of my hotel room, away from this laptop, and out into the Arizona sun. Even after so many visits, I'm not going to take it for granted. Look at the HP / MSFT announcement in that light.