5:11 pm - Monday March 27, 6367

Microsoft offers Office 365 on steroids with HP  

HP and Microsoft, which have always had a fairly tight relationship, just inked another agreement that enables HP to offer Office 365 services and support.

The new agreement will allow HP to manage Office 365 and related HP services for enterprise customers, and also allows select HP datacenters to be used by Microsoft for Office 365 email hosting.

windowsThe services will be administered through HP’s new business, HP Enterprise Services for Office 365. It will include front-end planning and advisory services as well as administration services for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online.

It will also help enterprises that are looking to deploy Office 365 set it up in Microsoft datacenters as well as providing ongoing support for the numerous online services that are required for the smooth operation of Office 365. HP boasted that the new services combine “all the capabilities and benefits of Office 365” with HP Enterprise Services to support the new style of IT, including managed service solutions, tightly integrated support processes and expanded data center location options. “This end-to-end solution creates enterprise class support for Office 365 with comprehensive accountability for the customer,” a HP spokesperson told CMSWire.

HP and Microsoft teams will work closely together to deliver this full solution to enterprise clients. Explaining the decision to tie-up with Microsoft on this, the spokesperson pointed out that several enterprise-sized customers asked for a deeper level of support for Office 365 and HP Enterprise Services.

The result is a set of services that combine all the capabilities and benefits of Office 365 with the delivery expertise and experience of HP Enterprise Services supporting a new style of IT, including managed service solutions, tightly integrated support processes and expanded data center location options.

What it does is create enterprise class support for Office 365 with comprehensive accountability for the customer. And for Microsoft, this is going to be key in the expansion of Office 365 beyond its established enterprise customer base.

HP, for all its troubles, is still an enterprise giant providing not only software services, but also hardware and infrastructure that could take Office 365 in places that no productivity suites have gone before, while Microsoft will get access to all those HP customers that are already using Microsoft business applications.

This will also be facilitated by the massive data center network that HP has already developed and continues to develop across numerous geographies, as well as the considerable experience HP says it has with Microsoft’s applications.

HP has significant data center capabilities and capacity, which could be used to complement and expand beyond Microsoft data center locations for Office 365, the spokesperson added.

– CMSWire


Share: