· Be built on a next-generation infrastructure-to-application model,

· Advance cloud computing by speeding application implementation,

· Eliminate complexities of IT management and automate existing manual processes to lower overall costs

This agreement represents the industry’s most comprehensive technology stack integration to date -- from infrastructure to application -- and is intended to substantially improve the customer experience for developing, deploying and managing IT environments.

With this strategic partnership, HP and Microsoft will collaborate on an engineering roadmap for data management machines; converged, prepackaged application solutions; comprehensive virtualization offerings and integrated management tools. Delivered through the industry’s most extensive sales and partner network, these dynamic IT solutions will be designed to provide:

— Increased business efficiency through solutions that respond to changing business requirements by seamlessly converging server, storage, network and application resources in a highly automated, self-managed environment.

— Improved application performance, reliability and availability for some of the industry’s top business applications, Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SQL Server, by creating a deeply optimized “machine” environment. This is achieved through turnkey, pre-integrated server, storage, networking and application packages. These data management and email machines provide “push-button” simplicity in deployment and management.

— Enhanced operations through integrated, interoperable virtualization and management tools that allow technology environments to be automatically provisioned, managed and continuously self-tuned.  Through the integration of HP Insight Software, HP Business Technology Optimization software and Microsoft System Center with Microsoft Hyper-V Server, enterprise customers use a unified management solution to automate application deployment along with infrastructure-to-application monitoring. This integration also delivers power and performance optimization, while ensuring interoperability in a heterogeneous datacenter environment.

— Investment protection and low total cost of ownership, enabling customers to deploy systems with confidence. The joint solutions are built on industry standards and designed to utilize existing data center investments, all managed through a common framework. This approach is designed to enable customers to integrate private or public cloud computing models as their business requires. HP and Microsoft will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform, with HP offering services, and Microsoft continuing to invest in HP hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.

The new infrastructure-to-application model from HP and Microsoft will be delivered as integrated offerings for large, heterogeneous datacenter environments as well as through solutions designed for small and midsized businesses. Solutions are available immediately, with new offerings being introduced throughout the next three years.

Based on our deployment of TelePresence, I had no choice but to attend the office to provide me with the flexibility of not travelling to New Zealand for meetings. This really hammers home that point that Unified Communications solutions must be flexible enough for “in-transit”, “away” or home users and that a Meeting Room to Meeting Room solution has some huge limitations.

The trade off is that I will not get the TelePresence experience from my netbook or tablet but it will provide me with a more flexible solution. the TelePresence experience is really good and I spend at least 4-5 hours a week in TelePresence suites conducting meetings with my colleagues in Auckland.

Will this drive Hybrid Solutions? Execs could TelePresence for high profile meetings and true mobile users or home users will use Office Communications Server as it is potentially a far cheaper flexible solution? This means maintaining two different conference solutions and two totally different experiences for VC users.

Also, If Nortel are the Visionaries and Avaya are in the leaders quadrant then the acquisition of Nortel by Avaya should put Avaya in a very strong position in the next release Gartner quadrant!

Hosted by:
Derrick Buckley, Craig Pringle, James McC, Johann Kruse

Date and time:
Tuesday, 18 November 2008 at 1:30 PM

Location name:
Level 23, World Square, Sydney

View this event on Windows Live

http://blogs.technet.com/markdea/archive/2008/10/14/top-tips-to-run-a-livemeeting.aspx

Cheers

Derrick

It works by federating your Active Directory with Microsoft services. Your employees will be able to access services with their corporate accounts, the same way they access the applications they use today.

Microsoft Services Connector will work for most Microsoft services, including those offered by third parties that use Microsoft developer services.

On the other hand, if you do not have AD and wish to federate directly with Microsoft – use the Federation Gateway http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287610.aspx

To download the CTP for Microsoft Services Connector, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=131672

Cheers

Derrick