Text 14772, 100 rader
Skriven 2006-12-16 11:11:04 av mike (1:379/45)
Ärende: Microsoft, HP Form Joint $300m Marketing Alliance
=========================================================
From: mike <mike@barkto.com>


http://www.betanews.com/article/1166056254


No doubt the requirement for HP to bully financial analysts who have made a
choice not to use Windows on their notebooks is a part of this agreement.


btw, I like the clear, focused answer given to the question in the last
paragraph.  :)


===
Calling Hewlett-Packard “the most comprehensive partner we haveö among a list
of over 640,000 such partners, Microsoft announced this evening, along with HP,
the formation of a joint marketing alliance, in which both companies would
jointly market unified messaging, collaboration, content management, custom
business workflow management, and other Microsoft software implemented on HP
hardware.

In a press conference this evening, two HP executives and two Microsoft
executives gave a sketchy, sometimes cloudy, outline of a new joint working
relationship between the two firms. Their joint activities officially begin
tomorrow. Neither side would describe the partnership as exclusive, though each
side tended to defer to the other with regard to matters of authority or
responsibility – for instance, whose customers are we talking about, and which
partner will approach those customers?

BetaNews asked the question directly: Who will approach these customers with
solutions, and who will represent the customers’ interests in working to attain
them? "Depending on the particular situation, the first contact might come from
Microsoft, it might come from HP, it might come from one of our channel
partners who see a great opportunity to be associated with this," responded Ann
Livermore, HP’s vice president for the Technology Solutions Group.

"That’s the power; we ought to be able to cover almost the whole world, between
the partners that Microsoft has, HP has, and our two sales forces. Then whoever
finds that lead will bring in the appropriate parties from the other
organization, to put together the solution offering. In some cases, it might be
a very simple implementation of a server with some software; in other cases, it
may be a much more complex solution which requires some consulting or design or
implementation services. But the power is that we can come at this from very
many different start points."

If the deal centers around any Microsoft software specifically, it’s from the
Server & Tools division: specifically Exchange Server 2007 (just released to
manufacturing) and Office Communications Server 2007. As HP’s Livermore stated
early in the conference, her company is primarily concentrating on features
such as unified communication, messaging, and point-of-presence tools featured
in the new Exchange, and facilitated through Communications Server.

Livermore also listed "business intelligence services" as a key product for
joint marketing. While Microsoft does not yet have a direct presence in that
field, partners of that company that do often build such services around SQL
Server – again, favoring Server & Tools.

"We have over 20,000 shared customers that we were able to parse today," added
Microsoft COO Kevin Martin, "which is an unbelievable number. We think there’s
20,000 more out there that we could extend this opportunity into. So it is
literally going to come from all different directions, but having that way of
doing business and a way to go to market and a muscle that we will leverage
through this ‘People-Ready Business’ initiative, is going to be very strategic
for us being able to assimilate all the right resources at the right time, to
deliver the right value for customers."

This does not appear to be a way for HP to sell Vista or for Microsoft to sell
ProLiant, so much as it’s an acknowledgement on the part of both parties that
their customers are not seeking hardware solutions and software solutions
separately. Both companies will be investing a total of $300 million (neither
would say who contributed how much) toward a three-year venture that markets
integrated solutions, by way of what Microsoft’s Martin described as an
"integrated partnership with HP."

"The most comprehensive partner that we have, out of the 640,000 partners that
we have at Microsoft, is Hewlett-Packard," pronounced Turner. "We interface
with them on a variety of dimensions." Later, HP senior vice president for
consulting and integration, John W. McCain, acknowledged that representatives
from both companies have been working to hammer out this agreement "for several
months."

Whether these negotiations were partly responsible for the delay in Windows
Vista’s enterprise release to November, from Microsoft’s original target date
of August –- as was implied by an article earlier this year in The New York
Times -- remains unknown, though not impossible.

When asked whether Novell and SUSE Linux would have a place in the two
companies’ joint solutions, Turner appeared to answer in the negative, though
not in so few words. "This particular initiative," he said, "is about selling
our portfolio and it’s about selling HP’s portfolio...and us being able to
bundle those in an integrated way, in a go-to-market way, and in an elegant
solution for customers and for CIOs...This is about, how do we extend both of
our opportunities and really leverage where the market’s going?"
===

   /m

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5
 * Origin: Barktopia BBS Site http://HarborWebs.com:8081 (1:379/45)