MicroHP — the New IT Giant? 112
storagedude writes "Although it may have gone unnoticed by most IT industry watchers, this week's announcement from Microsoft and HP that the two have combined on integrated appliances for corporate business intelligence and email could be the start of a closer relationship between the two IT giants as they seek to counteract the growing hardware and software dominance of IBM and Oracle. From the article: 'Combine Microsoft and HP — call it MicroHP — and what do you have? A full Windows-plus-Linux scale-out hardware and software lineup, with an exceptionally strong position both in SaaS/public cloud and data centers, and a huge presence on the business desktop. This would allow such a combined entity to produce well-tuned appliances for such hot areas as BI/analytics — as Microsoft and HP have just done.'"
HP made a similar deal with Oracle (Score:5, Informative)
a couple years back, to sell an appliance running Oracle's DB and data warehousing software on HP server hardware. That was supposed to be a big deal for both companies, until Oracle acquired HP's archrival Sun a few months later. Then Mark Hurd was kicked out of HP and joined Oracle, with Ellison dissing HP's board for its incompetence in letting Hurd go. It might be possible to still buy this Oracle-HP appliance, but I doubt that either company is pushing it very hard.
In other words, this is the kind of short term marketing alliance that happens all the time in the tech world, usually with lots of hoopla and smiling CEOs making speeches about a new era of this or that. Most of them don't amount to much. In the case of HP and Microsoft, there is perhaps a fit with HP lacking enterprise database software and Microsoft struggling in the business intelligence space. But wait until either one makes an acquisition or another big deal, for example Microsoft with Dell to sell BI appliances, then we'll stop hearing from the two companies about how excellent this one is.
Re:Linux != all *nixes (Score:5, Informative)
That's why it's called 'HP-SUX' even by people who work there.
Re:Author seems to be missing something... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sure HP isn't interested [hp.com] at all [hp.com] in the Linux on Intel [hp.com]. :-/
R&D at Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sure google would love a merger: two top heavy companies doing everything they can to kill R&D
Do you have even the faintest notion of what Microsoft spends on R&D?
Microsoft's $8.7 billion in R&D expenses for the 2010 fiscal year represented 14 percent of the company's $62.5 billion in annual revenue. That was down slightly from the previous year, when the R&D expenses of $9 billion represented about 15 percent of its revenue, roughly in line with its traditional ratio.
Microsoft's annual R&D spending dips for first time in five years [techflash.com]
Pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding took the top position for innovation spending, having boosted its R&D spend 11.6% to $9.1 billion, replacing Toyota Motor, which cut spending nearly 20% and fell to fourth place.
In fact, healthcare companies took 5 of the top 10 spots on the list and 7 of the top 20.
Microsoft (#2), Nokia (#3) and Pfizer (#5) rounded out the top five. Corporate R&D spending declined during 2009 downturn, finds Booz & Company global innovation 1000 study [zawya.com]