HPE Discover - Microsoft and HPE's 'friends with benefits' open relationship
- Summary:
- Poor Meg Whitman lost her voice on day one of HPE's Discover conference, but the beefed-up open relationship with Microsoft took center-stage anyway.
Meg Whitman was in need of what she called a “real life version of back up and recovery” yesterday as a sore throat took down the HP Enterprise (HPE) CEO at the worst possible moment.
Whitman took center stage at the HPE Discover conference in London Tuesday, the first public outing for the firm since Hewlett Packard split in two last month. Hence there was much talk of “historic day” and so on, although the clear underlying message to customers was one of continuity and safe pair of hands.
HPE is the future, said Whitman, while her voice held up, but it is built on the “rich legacy of Hewlett Packard”. That won’t change, she insisted:
Technologies may change and business models may shift. But one thing never changes for us, and that's the importance of our relationships with you, our customers and partners. That was the foundation of Hewlett-Packard more than 75 years ago and it will remain the foundation of Hewlett Packard Enterprise far into the future.
But the world has changed and it’s all about re-invention as well as invention, she added:
Success in the world favors companies that can invent and re-invent at warp speed.
This is where HPE’s experiences as part of the divestiture from the HP mothership will inform future offerings, said Whitman, making it:
one of the few companies that can help enterprises navigate to what I call the 'new style of business'.
In a six week period in the run-up to the split of HPE and the PC and printer-focused HP Inc, the IT teams built 4,000 servers, generated 400,000 email boxes and managed 500 projects in flight across 170 countries. Or as Whitman put it before giving up on her presentation and leaving the rest of the keynote to her team:
To help you get faster, we had to get faster as well.
Friends with benefits
In reality, the biggest announcement of the keynote had in fact been pre-announced by Whitman last week in HP’s post-quarterly results conference call, when she told the world that the firm would be snuggling up closer to Microsoft to support its hybrid cloud vision. At the time, she said:
Microsoft shares our view of a hybrid IT approach for enterprises and we both see opportunity to simplify hybrid infrastructure for our customers.
Going forward, Microsoft Azure will become a preferred public cloud partner. HPE will serve as a preferred provider of Microsoft infrastructure and services for its hybrid cloud offerings.
That was only the tip of the iceberg however with the announcements yesterday putting the lid on HP”s Helion hybrid cloud strategy. Lack of customer interest in Helion as a public cloud platform led to October’s decision to “sunset” the service from January next year.
So the first aspect of the new Microsoft relationship is HPE citing Microsoft Azure as a preferred public cloud option for its customers.
Beyond that, the other elements of the new alliance are:
- HPE will sell a new appliance, the Hyper-Converged 250 for Microsoft CPS Standard, which comes with Windows Server 2012 R2, HPE OneView for Microsoft System Center and Windows Azure Pack.
- HPE will serve as a "preferred partner" in providing infrastructure and services for Microsoft's hybrid cloud offerings.
- HPE will certify an additional 5,000 Azure Cloud Architects to improve integration with Azure for its Enterprise Services customers.
- HPE and Microsoft will also create HPE Azure Centers of Excellence in Palo Alto, California and Houston, Texas, that will work on creating "a seamless hybrid cloud experience when leveraging Azure across HPE infrastructure".
- Microsoft joins the HPE Composable Infrastructure Partner Program, while HPE returns the compliment by joining Microsoft’s Cloud Solution Provider program, and sells Microsoft cloud solutions across azure, Office 365 and the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite.
To emphasize the importance of the new tie-up, there was the near-compulsory tech conference virtual appearance by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to big up the two firms shared vision:
To me, what is really required to meet the real world needs of customers, not just today, but way out into the future, is a truly distributed cloud infrastructure. That’s why we believe in this hybrid cloud infrastructure. So we are building out a hyper scale cloud infrastructure in Azure.
Customers have infrastructure on tap that’s programmable. Then on top of that they have data fabric that really infuses every application they build with intelligence and supports the new way of developers working, which is dev ops and continuous development.
So we have a vision which is much broader than just building any one part, but which is truly picking out this distributed computing fabric. With our partnership, we can truly bring forward this new form of distributed or hybrid computing to give our customers the infrastructure that they need so they have the next level of agility, efficiency and innovation.
All that said, it’s important to note one point of semantic importance. HPE has named Microsoft as ‘a’ preferred public cloud provider, not ‘the’ preferred cloud provider. There’s still skin in the game with the likes of OpenStack.
And for its part, Microsoft’s not offering HPE anything that it hasn’t offered the old enemy Dell.
So it's more of a case of friends with benefits, but still an open relationship.
My take
It’s a pity about Whitman’s loss of voice. Her leading from the front for the main keynote at the first major public HPE conference would have been a strong image.
But it’s off and running. The stall is set out. 2016’s where the execution of the vision needs to be seen to deliver results.