Several interesting developments made the headlines of business and technology portals this month. But one that caught my attention was the US $250 million Microsoft-HP deal unveiled recently. In a nutshell, the deal is simply a joint go-to-market effort. But it got noticed by experts and analysts alike. Speculations abound on the reasons for the deal. Some say it’s a public cloud play. Others feel it is a private cloud play. Still others interpret it as an indirect attempt to lock customers into buying integrated hardware/software/services stacks that the two companies are calling ‘Smart Bundles’.

But, I am inclined to interpret it as an open war for the supremacy in the cloud. Here’s why. In case you didn’t notice, the deal was announced a day after Microsoft’s arch rival (in the virtualisation space) VMware announced its takeover of Zimbra, the messaging vendor from Yahoo. Also, this alliance could serve as an effective response to a similar tie-up between Cisco, VMware and EMC on private clouds announced in November 2009.

Now, it will be interesting to see how HP, which already has a similar relationship with VMware, plays the balancing game. A few HP blogs claim that Microsoft is ‘a’ preferred provider of virtualisation solutions for HP and not ‘the’ only provider.

Smart Bundles - which are the combinations of HP hardware, Microsoft and HP infrastructure software, and different MS-HP apps build on top of SQL and Exchange Servers - will be available to small/mid-size businesses and partners who want to offer them as a cloud service. Although there has been no written commitment, there is speculation that at some point Microsoft and HP can also offer BI, online-transaction-processing and messaging apps in the Azure (Microsoft’s cloud operating system).

This will give Microsoft a chance to get strong foothold in the virtualisation, management and data centre spaces, where VMware is also aiming for supremacy. Clearly, battlelines are getting drawn in the cloud! But for customers, it’s a win-win – they will get a choice between Microsoft and VMware.

rahul.mani@9dot9.in