HPE Closes Ranks With Microsoft on Windows 10

Microsoft last week announced a collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to push Windows 10 solutions to enterprises worldwide.

The collaboration will occur in three areas: cloud, productivity and mobility.

The move harks back to the strategy Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella outlined last year, saying the company would focus on cloud, mobile and empowering users everywhere.

HPE will offer integrated services and solutions to modernize and streamline workflows and accelerate enterprise transformation on the Windows 10 platform, Microsoft said.

"This is an important go-to-market partnership that builds on a long-running relationship between Microsoft and many parts of HP that are now in two different companies," said Al Hilwa, a research program director at IDC.

It will consist of "tie-ins around HPE servers and customers, and Microsoft Azure Cloud and some really interesting vertical applications the two will concentrate on," he told the E-Commerce Times. "This is related to mobile and Windows 10 insofar as HPE services are involved in implementation projects with these for customers."

What Enterprises Will Be Offered

HPE consultants will perform digital process design, application development and prototyping to help transform clients' business processes. The company will pair its services with Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite, Dynamics CRM, Office 365, Skype for Business and Windows 10 for the Enterprise.

On top of HPE's current advisory and delivery capabilities through the Windows 10 ecosystem, it will offer other cloud productivity and mobile platform products.

HPE and Microsoft are building rich application solutions for the healthcare, automotive and financial sectors, Microsoft said. The collaboration also seeks to speed up Windows 10-based enterprise solutions' penetration of the retail, energy and transportation industries.

In addition to transforming business processes and the way work gets done, the collaboration seeks to provide a new level of customer services and experiences on any Windows 10 device.

Mobile: The Weak Link

Microsoft is emphasizing mobility, but it hasn't done really well in the mobile arena. The company doesn't have good flagship devices, Nadella admitted earlier this year, summing up Microsoft's woes in the mobile phone arena.

Last week, Microsoft publicly admitted that Project Astoria, its tool that will help port Android apps to Windows 10 Mobile, has been delayed.

Meanwhile, the Win 10 Mobile iOS porting tool -- Project Islandwood -- requires that developers tweak their iOS app code and recompile the app.

This doesn't bode well for Microsoft, which has a dearth of mobile apps.

HP had stumbled badly in mobile, throwing away the $1.2 billion it invested in Palm, selling off the Palm patents to Alcatel, and open sourcing Palm's WebOS.

What About the Cloud?

HPE will close down its Helion public cloud offering as of Jan. 31, it last month confirmed, after to-ing and fro-ing on that issue earlier this year. It will partner with multiple public cloud providers instead to provide hybrid public/private clouds.

However, HPE will continue to innovate and invest in its Helion OpenStack platform, which it says has seen strong customer adoption and runs its HP Helion CloudSystem private cloud solution.

It also will continue to focus on its managed and virtual private cloud offerings.

"HPE is most definitively not getting out of providing technology to help build clouds," said John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group. "Neither is it getting out of SaaS nor private and hybrid cloud services."

The company is pulling back from public Infrastructure as a Service "where it would be competing very directly against AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine and IBM SoftLayer," he told the E-Commerce Times.

Public IaaS "is not a big revenue stream for HPE," Dinsdale pointed out, and remaining competitive there is "incredibly tough due to the issues of economy and scale." -30