HP, Microsoft Team to Deliver End-to-End Unified Communications and Collaboration Solution

HP and Microsoft (News - Alert) have announced a four-year strategic global initiative to deliver an end-to-end unified communications (UC) and collaboration solution.

 

 

”Together, we are offering the extensive breadth of capabilities of our respective technologies to deliver a truly UC and collaboration solution to help our customers improve business productivity,” said Stephen Elop, president for Microsoft Business Division at Microsoft.

 

The Frontline Partnership calls upon the companies to invest up to an additional $180 million in product development, professional services, and also joint sales and marketing, to help organizations lower costs and improve productivity.

 

The solution has been planned to span software, hardware, networking and services, according to companies’ officials and is expected to enable customers to improve business output and reduce travel, telecom and IT operating costs.

 

This will be accomplished by streamlining communications across messaging, video and voice with connected applications and devices. In addition, HP and Microsoft said it intends to provide the flexibility and control customers need to manage their communications infrastructure.

”Customers can lower costs and rapidly enhance employee productivity with unified communications and collaboration from HP and Microsoft," said Ann Livermore, executive vice president for Technology Solutions (News - Alert) Group at HP.

 

He said that both the companies share a vision for business productivity solutions built on open, software-based platforms that work with the applications and systems people know and use today.

“Microsoft's approach to unified communications and collaboration solutions, combined with HP's global technology and services, will help us drive innovation and growth in our business,” said Tina Atkinson, program sponsor for New Ways of Working at Cathay Pacific Airways.

 

He said that Cathay Pacific Airways followed a detailed tender process and selected Microsoft and HP because they met the requirements for a flexible and comprehensive approach to unified communications and collaboration, tailored to the company’s needs.

 

HP and Microsoft are expected to form joint teams to collaborate on products and services development across Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Office Communications Server, and also HP ProCurve networking products.

Additionally, HP plans to obtain Microsoft Unified Communications (News - Alert) qualification for the HP dx9000 TouchSmart Business PC and select smartphones as well as Microsoft Unified Communications qualification for new IP desk phones.

Also, the companies will provide end point interoperability with HP Halo Telepresence (News - Alert) Solutions and Microsoft Office Communications Server-based unified conferencing.

HP and Microsoft also intend to target communications service providers, offering them the same technologies and services to enable hosted UC and collaboration services for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).