Microsoft & HP to focus on benefits of Infrastructure-to-Application Model at Middle East CIO Summit 2011

Microsoft Gulf and HP Middle East announced their joint participation at the 2011 edition of the Middle East CIO Summit 2011 with the objective of leveraging their partnership to give regional CIOs a comprehensive insight into the latest solutions and benefits to further drive their initiative to invest $250 million on building a next-generation infrastructure-to-application model to significantly simplify technology environments for businesses of all sizes. 

Samer Abu-Ltaif, Regional General Manager, Microsoft Gulf said, “We are delighted to be participating at the Middle East CIO Summit 2011 event along with HP as it gives us a great platform to engage with CIOs from across the region and let them know how we are improving the customer experience for developing, deploying and managing IT environments. Our agreement is now truly enabling business customers from across the region to optimize performance at the lowest-possible total cost of ownership with a simplified set of solutions across hardware, software and services. We are currently working with 8 joint partners across the region and have signed on more than 30 customers signifying the success of our joint approach to create more customer value.” 

 “HP & Microsoft’s agreement represents the industry’s most comprehensive technology stack integration to date and we are already seeing evidence of the strong momentum generated by this partnership with a range of joint solutions built on industry standards,” said Eyad Shihabi, Managing Director and Enterprise Business Lead, HP Middle East. “Our joint participation at the Middle East CIO summit is a significant opportunity for us to showcase how we are eliminating complexities of IT management and delivering a wide range of cloud capabilities to enhance the competitive advantage of our customers.” 

Rick Bakken, Senior Director for DataCenter Evangelism, Microsoft will be a keynote speaker at the event where his session will be titled “Realizing the Promise of Cloud Computing with Microsoft Private Cloud.”  According to Rick, “ At the Middle East CIO Summit, I will be sharing insights into how Microsoft  is providing products, technologies and offerings across private and public clouds, thereby bringing the benefits of cloud computing – business and resource agility, reduced management complexity, operational efficiency and cost reduction to customers. My keynote will also focus on how HP and Microsoft are making it easy for customers to adopt, maintain, and derive greater value from technology through converged virtualization, management, and application solutions.”

Duncan Campbell, Vice President - Worldwide Marketing, Converged Infrastructure, Enterprise Storage, Servers and Networking from HP Enterprise Business will also be speaking at the summit. In his keynote speech, Duncan will highlight HP’s vision on how to make the Cloud real for the regional business environment with practical solutions and services. “The customer challenges are clear – they want to know how to apply more innovation to survive and thrive in 2011 while operation costs are substantial and increasing. My talk will address these issues and more,” Duncan concluded. 

As part of their joint partnership, HP and Microsoft are conducting several initiatives in the form of Private Cloud CIO roundtables across the Gulf, participation in events like the Middle East CIO Summit, Tech.Ed, partner trainings and customer briefings to demonstrate the value of their partnership and solutions. 

Building Private Clouds with Hyper-V Cloud and the Windows Server Platform 

As part of the Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track program, HP and Microsoft have jointly developed HP Cloud Foundation for Hyper-V, a reference architecture that combines HP BladeSystem Matrix, Microsoft System Center and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V to provide customers with a proven foundation for running business applications within a private cloud computing environment. 

Expanding the reach of business intelligence 

With the HP Business Decision Appliance, HP and Microsoft have greatly reduced the time and effort it takes for IT to configure, deploy and manage a comprehensive business intelligence solution, compared with a traditional business intelligence solution where applications, infrastructure and productivity tools are not pre-integrated. This appliance is optimized for Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft SharePoint and can be installed and configured by IT in less than one hour. 

-The HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance is a data store designed for small and midsize businesses that delivers enterprise-class functionality with increased simplicity and administrator-free operation. Through interoperability with the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform, customers can deliver managed business intelligence solutions to everyone in an organization. 

Enterprise-class messaging in hours 

The new HP E5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 is the industry’s first self-contained, pre-configured platform for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 that delivers enterprise-class messaging to businesses of all sizes. This messaging system, which can be deployed in as little as a few hours, delivers large mailboxes at a low cost, centralized archiving and 24/7 access from any device, and it can scale as business needs grow.

For more information customers can http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2010/jan10/01-13inftoapppr.mspx.