The biggest bit of news at last week's InterOp show in Las Vegas was the announcement of a four-year global initiative between HP and Microsoft to deliver an end-to-end unified communications and collaboration solution. Termed the Frontline Partnership, the announcement came during the keynote address by Marius Haas, Senior Vice President and General Manager of HP ProCurve Networking. The companies plan to invest up to an additional $180 million in product development, professional services, as well as joint sales and marketing, to stake out a larger share of the burgeoning UC market.The alliance will reportedly address three primary areas: product development and integration, professional services (primarily through EDS), and marketing/sales. For the announcement Mr. Haas was joined on stage by Ann Livermore, Executive VP for HP's Technology Solutions Group, and Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft's Business Division. To show off the capabilities they used HP's Halo Telepresence Solution to set up a video link to one of their trial users, Tina Atkinson, the program sponsor for New Ways of Working at Cathay Pacific Airways in Singapore (where it was a little after midnight).
According to Manfred Arndt, HP Distinguished Technologist for UC Solutions, this agreement is an expansion of his company's existing relationship with Microsoft. They intend to provide HP products that are configured and tested to work cleanly with the Microsoft tools. By merging Microsoft's market-leading Office Communications Server (OCS) UC platform with HP's PC, video, wired and wireless infrastructure products they intend to provide a full line alternative to Cisco. HP has already demonstrated OCS support on their smartphones and PCs, and intends to deliver OCS-capable desk sets.
The big news was HP stepping up with Microsoft as a serious challenger to Cisco's dominance in infrastructure and expanding presence in VoIP and UC. Based on their price points, HP is already challenging Cisco in many cost-sensitive bids, and their extensive booth that was positioned right in front of the main entrance to the show floor seemed to say: "We have arrived."
The big questions going forward will be how big an impact this has and how soon. As Don Van Doren noted in his post last week, there have been lots of "partnerships" in the UC field. Certainly this one makes more sense than the Innovative Communications Alliance Microsoft announced with Nortel back in 2006, when Microsoft was already advancing the idea that OCS would effectively "Pac Man" the entire PBX business. As Mr. Arndt notes, there is almost no overlap between the HP and Microsoft product lines.
As Van Doren pointed out, it is difficult to see how an alliance with HP strengthens Microsoft's prospects in voice communications. Voice is still a key component in UC, and neither of the partners has a lot in the way of credentials in that area. Working together they could potentially get into the game more quickly, and if they coordinate their efforts effectively, begin merging the various wired/WLAN/cellular network environments, and deliver the full range of UC capabilities.
There are still plenty of gaps in UC product capabilities. The question is whether those deficiencies can be addressed more quickly by one big company (Cisco) or two big companies (HP and Microsoft) working in concert.
