HP and Microsoft Corp. announced a four-year strategic global initiative to deliver end-to-end unified communications and collaboration solutions. The announcement came during a press conference at Microsoft offices in Riyadh. As part of their Frontline Partnership, the two companies expect to invest up to an additional $180 million in product development, professional services, as well as joint sales and marketing, to help organizations in Saudi and around the world lower costs and improve productivity. The end-to-end solution, which is planned to span software, hardware, networking and services would, enable customers to improve business output and reduce travel, telecom and IT operating costs. This would be accomplished by streamlining communications across messaging, video and voice with connected applications and devices. HP and Microsoft also plan to provide the flexibility and control customers need to manage their communications infrastructure efficiently. “With the announcement of this global strategic initiative, we are enabling customers in Saudi Arabia to lower costs and significantly enhance employee productivity with a complete range of unified communications and collaboration solutions from HP and Microsoft,” said Ziad Mortaja, Managing Director, HP Saudi Arabia. “Customers will be able to use rich and intuitive solutions accessible from anywhere on nearly any device to deliver better bottom line results”. HP and Microsoft 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. “Together, we are offering the extensive breadth of capabilities of our respective technologies to deliver a truly unified communications and collaboration solution to help our customers improve business productivity and reduce costs,” said Dr. Khaled Al-Dhaher, general manager, Microsoft in Saudi Arabia. “This means one click to communicate, one click to conference, one click to collaborate.” During the announcement Microsoft's Unified Communications technology was demonstrated on HP-sponsored servers and desktops at Microsoft's Customer Immersion Experience (CIE) Lab which provides a hands-on experience to business decision makers to try out day to day end user scenarios. CIE is designed to reduce the need for customers and partners to invest time and money in proof of concepts. The CIE program enables customers to role-play 11 different scenarios that they can choose from to demonstrate in the CIE session. The 11 scenarios covered are powering personal productivity, maximizing meetings, an easier way to search and share, working together and saving time online, controlling content chaos, protecting the environment by using an e-form, better communication with customers and partners, decision making and dashboards, simplifying business communications, exploring business through social networking and demonstrating a productive day at work. As part of the product development and integration, HP and Microsoft will form joint teams to collaborate on products and services development across Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Office Communications Server, as well as HP ProCurve networking products. The two companies will also provide end point interoperability with HP Halo Telepresence Solutions and Microsoft Office Communications Server-based unified conferencing, enabling remote participants at any Microsoft Office Communication Server-enabled PC to join telepresence conferences. Additionally, HP will obtain Microsoft Unified Communications qualification for the HP dx9000 TouchSmart Business PC and select smartphones and for new IP desk phones. HP Business Technology Optimization (BTO) software will provide additional support for Microsoft Office Communications Server, including the ability to provide real-time quality of service metrics for the voice and video network over the IP infrastructure.
