UPDATED 11:38 EDT / NOVEMBER 24 2015

NEWS

HPE & Microsoft to collaborate on Cloud, Mobility & Windows 10

Following its split from HP Inc. last month, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) has wasted little time in reinforcing its warm relationship with Microsoft, announcing a new collaboration to push Windows 10 solutions to enterprises worldwide.

The two companies said they’ll collaborate in three areas, namely in cloud, mobility and productivity. It’s a move that echoes the strategy laid out by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last year, when he said the company would concentrate on cloud, mobile and “empowering users everywhere”. The pitch is that the combined assets and capabilities of HPE and Microsoft will ensure that enterprises can rely on them to deploy industry leading solutions on any screen, Microsoft said in a blog post.

The nuts and bolts of it is this: HPE’s experts will take care of the digital process design, application development and prototyping, pairing these services with products like the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite, Dynamics CRM, Office 365, Skype for Business and Windows 10 for the Enterprise, to “transform clients’ business processes”.

In addition, HPE will also offer other cloud productivity and mobile platform products through the Windows 10 ecosystem, the companies said. In particular, the tech giants are building “rich application solutions” for specific industries such as automotive, financial and healthcare, Microsoft said. In addition, the companies are looking to speed up Windows 10’s adoption in the energy, retail and transportation industries.

Finally, the two firms said they’re looking to deliver a new level of customer experience and services on any Windows 10 device.

HPE and Microsoft are certainly talking a good game, but there is one glaring hole in their strategy that needs to be addressed – in mobility.

Microsoft has struggled miserably to gain any traction in that area, as CEO Nadella more or less acknowledged earlier this year when he admitted the company doesn’t possess any good flagship smartphones, though of course it does still have its Surface Pro lineup. The other problem for Windows in mobile is apps, or rather the lack of them – and this was only exacerbated when Microsoft said it was canceling Project Astoria, a tool that would have allowed developers to port their Android apps to the Windows platform.

HPE’s own mobile efforts are, if anything, even more dismal. The company has no devices to speak of and wasted the $1.2 billion it splunked on Palm, selling off its patents and open-sourcing Palm’s WebOS. HPE has also struggled in cloud, and recently announced it’s planning to shut down its Helion cloud offering in January next year. Instead, the company will renew its focus on its Helion OpenStack platform and partner with multiple public cloud vendors to deliver hybrid clouds.

Nonetheless, these shortcomings aren’t a big concern for Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller, who is convinced HPE’s partnership will prove to be different from norm.

“What at first glance looks like a prototypical Microsoft partner announcement – a services partner using new Microsoft products to drum up business in its installed base and maybe chip off some business from the competition ‎– is getting different with the inclusion of Dynamics and HPE building IP (Intellectual Property) on top of the product,” Mueller said.

He explained that these are the value adds that partners need to bring to product based offerings in order to create both value and differentiation for their customers. In other words, Mueller is convinced it’ll turn out to be a good move by both players.

“Microsoft will try to sign as many of these as possible to get its platforms and services in more Enterprises hands, and HPE needs to look for attention as being a newly formed entity and differentiation for keeping existing business – and ideally expanding to new business,” the analyst concluded.


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