At the same time HPE will be the preferred partner for infrastructure and services for Microsoft’s hybrid cloud offerings.
Advertisement
Recently, we surveyed 5 analysts were expecting an average of $0.41 earnings per share for Hewlett Packard Company, for the 1 quarter of the fiscal year ending in 2017.
During the recent fourth-quarter earnings call – the last for the 86-year-old Hewlett-Packard Co. before future earnings reports are split between HP Inc. and HPE – CEO Meg Whitman revealed that HPE will tap Azure as a preferred public cloud provider.
The partners said Tuesday (Dec. 1) at an HPE event in London they would integrate Microsoft Azure and HPE’s cloud infrastructure and services into what they described as a “hyper-converged hybrid cloud system”.
By providing discounts for their HP printers and several price drops in their products, HP hoped to at least alleviate the slow downfall of their shares which started with this year, but due to the rise in power of the dollar, their value fell even more when compared to European and Eastern markets. HPE says that, among others, it is working with Chef, Ansible on bare metal, Docker for containers, VMware on ESXi/vSphere, Microsoft and Nvidia.
The move brings to a decidedly happy close HP’s dalliance into the world of public cloud services. What it didn’t like was Microsoft competing with it in the fast evolving tablet market and threatening to take away market share it desperately needed.
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.
The partnership will also extend HPE’s current cloud and mobility advisory and delivery capabilities.
Along with the savings that come from lowering overprovisioning, HPE Synergy can help businesses setup and deliver applications “at cloud speed”. There is also Mesosphere with its platform that pools resources across a datacenter as if it were a single machine. HPE will also certify 5,000 of its own employees on running Azure.
HPE didn’t reveal specifics of the announcement, although critics said it wasn’t surprising HP chose to side with Microsoft rather than Amazon or Google.
Bringing together industry leading HPE ProLiant technology and Microsoft Azure innovation, the jointly engineered solution brings Azure services to customers’ datacenters, empowering users to choose where and how they want to leverage the cloud. What will be interesting is how the provisioning engine within HPE Synergy copes with multiple cloud tiers as well as the on-premises deployment. For example, will they both be available on the platform?
In one example, Paul Durzan, a VP of product management at HPE, listed nine APIs DevOps usually have to code for to automate the way applications use infrastructure.
The companies already have something to show for their collaboration and integration efforts in the form of the HPE Hyper-Converged 250 for Microsoft Cloud Platform Standard.
Organizations today have more opportunities than ever before to quickly deliver new applications and services, embrace new business models and enter new markets.
Advertisement
This may be easier said than done.
