Companies unveil HP appliances running Microsoft software
This post has been updated to include comment from a Forrester industry analyst.
Just over a year ago, HP and Microsoft announced a $250 million partnership to jointly develop HP appliances running Microsoft software platforms including Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server. Today, some of the fruits of that collaboration are coming to market.
HP introduced the HP Business Decision Appliance, a server delivering business intelligence technology on SQL Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010, and the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance running SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse software. Both are available now. Coming to market in March is the HP E5000 Messaging system running Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and, coming in June, the HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance.
These products are based on what HP has presented in the past as its “Converged Infrastructure” approach to the market, in which HP will put together the hardware, software and other components for the customer in one appliance or one collection of technology. Oracle has been promoting a similar build it, test it, install it approach, too, of late, although for them, everything comes from Oracle.
With HP and Microsoft, the idea is to deliver an appliance that is not just pre-installed with Microsoft software, but preconfigured and optimized for the hardware. The goal is to make the appliance simple to deploy with a minimal amount of hassle for the customer’s IT staff, said Jim Ganthier, vice president of marketing, for industry standard servers and software at HP.
“[We want to] put these really powerful tools in the hands of line of business owners and allow customers to be able to do this without the armies of consultants … or the amount of time lost for the integration of a lot of these devices,” said Ganthier, who claimed that these appliances can be deployed as quickly as an hour after delivery.
HP cited a 2009 Standish Group survey that only 32 percent of IT projects that deliver critical business applications are rated as “successful” by the IT teams that implemented them, often due to the complexity of highly customized deployments and stacks of proprietary software.
Microsoft gains a stronger presence in the data warehousing appliance market through its partnership with HP, said Jim Kobielus, a Forrester analyst. It has not had a strong presence in that market previously.
“Now, Microsoft has a high end data warehousing appliance that can duke it out with Oracle Exadata and IBM Smart Analytics systems,” he said.
To be sure, IBM, Dell and other hardware markers can tell you how well they can make Microsoft or other software run smoothly on their hardware, said Kobielus. But HP also says it integrates systems management tools like HP Insight Manager and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager to work well together.
As businesses grow, they become more dependent on technology to run their business and to stay competitive. But with the growth of IT comes a growth in complexity that is harder for smaller IT staffs to keep up with. Anything that makes it easier for a company to use business software like SharePoint or SQL Server will likely be a welcome development.
