The agreement will focus on delivering new solutions like next-generation infrastructure-to-application model, advance cloud computing by speeding application implementation  and eliminate complexities of IT management, and automate existing manual processes to lower the overall costs.

With this strategic partnership, HP and Microsoft will collaborate on an engineering roadmap for data management machines; converged, prepackaged application solutions; comprehensive virtualization offerings; and integrated management tools.

The new solutions developed by HP and Microsoft will help in increased business efficiency through solutions that respond to changing business requirements by seamlessly converging server, storage, network and application resources in a highly automated, and self-managed environment.

Enhanced operations through integrated, interoperable virtualization and management tools that allow technology environments to be automatically provisioned, managed and continuously self-tuned.
This integration also delivers power and performance optimization, while ensuring interoperability in a heterogeneous data center environment.

The joint solutions are built on industry standards and designed to utilize existing data center investments, all managed through a common framework. This approach is designed to enable customers to integrate private or public cloud computing models as their business requires.

Under the terms of the expanded partnership, the two companies will increase their global investment by 10 times to drive new opportunities for the 32,000 HP and Microsoft Frontline channel partners.

“This collaboration will allow HP and Microsoft to offer our customers transformative technology that will reduce costs, generate business growth and accelerate innovation” said Mark Hurd, HP chairman and chief executive officer.

“This agreement, which spans hardware, software and services, will enable business customers to optimize performance with push-button simplicity at the lowest-possible total cost of ownership,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft.