Microsoft And HP Invest $250 Million In Joint Cloud Computing Venture

Yesterday, Microsoft and HP announced a joint call to discuss a significant partnership. Now we know what it is. According to another announcement issued today, the two tech giants are jointly investing $250 million in a cloud computing venture.

The solution will advance existing cloud computing by speeding application implementation and will be built on a next-generation infrastructure-to-application model. The new offering will also promise to be less complex and will lower overall costs for enterprises. It seems to basically hook Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, which went live earlier this month, into HP’s hardware. The resulting offering promises to deliver improved application performance, efficiency and interoperability. The venture is also designed to allow users to integrate private or public cloud computing models as their business requires, which is a boon to many businesses.

The new infrastructure-to-application model from the two companies, which will be available immediately, will be delivered as integrated offerings for large, heterogeneous data center environments as well as through solutions designed for small and midsize businesses.

Microsoft is clearly moving rapidly to deploy automated solutions in partnership with HP to bridge on-premise data solutions with the cloud-based Azure platform.