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HP Microsoft Software Hardware IT

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.'"
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MicroHP — the New IT Giant?

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  • MicroHP? (Score:5, Funny)

    by somersault ( 912633 ) on Saturday January 22, 2011 @04:29PM (#34967560) Homepage Journal

    I think HPoSoft would be a better name, pronounced "hipposoft".

  • 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

    Windows and linux? and MS is involved. In other news Satan has said these last few months have been fucking freezing.

    • by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Saturday January 22, 2011 @04:59PM (#34967770)

      Plus Microsoft would get a Phone OS.

      The main reason I hope this happens is that then maybe a greedy MicroHP would stop making drivers for other Operating systems besides windows. The worst software on my mac for the past decade has always been, bar none, HP scanner software. it's like toenail fungus. it gets into your system and spreads from user to user. Then it curses you for trying to run multiple instances of itself.

      • by Winckle ( 870180 )

        Tell me about it. and then they stop supporting your scanner for no reason at all!

        Do yourself a favour. Uninstall the software and get a copy of Vuescan [hamrick.com]

        I know I sound like a shill to others, but you know how much HP's Mac software sucks.

        • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

          by twebb72 ( 903169 )

          Do yourself a favour....

          ... and don't buy a Mac

        • Their PC software sucks too. And the hardware wont work with Linux.

          Do yourself a favour - toss the HP kit in the skip.

          • I have an HP Laser Printer and an HP Scanner with TMA that I use with Linux more than with Windows. FUD, much?

            • I have an HP Laser Printer and an HP Scanner with TMA that I use with Linux more than with Windows. FUD, much?

              Seconded. I have an HP laserjet (1020--firmware is uploaded by the driver) that I have plugged into my file server running Gentoo. I have never directly plugged this printer into Windows and it works just fine, even as a home network printer. It behaves well over the network with pretty much every other box in the house.

              The trick is to research what hardware in your price range will work with the OS

              • The trick is to research what hardware in your price range will work with the OS of your choice, which I suspect the OP probably didn't do.

                Or just to know something before you buy something. I knew that my printer would work because it speaks PCL and even if it didn't it would work anyway because of the pxlmono driver, which ALSO works with it. The scanner I bought for five bucks at the flea and got it home to find out the latest Windows drivers are for Vista. Note that this is a totally arbitrary distinction by HP to force you to buy a new scanner if you move to Windows 7, since the scanner speaks the very same protocol that virtually all oth

                • The trick is to research what hardware in your price range will work with the OS of your choice, which I suspect the OP probably didn't do.

                  Or just to know something before you buy something.

                  Which was effectively the point I was trying to make, but thank you for reiterating it. :)

                  Not all sub-$100 printers are supported (yet) by, for example, foomatic et al, so what I was implying was that it's a good idea to research which hardware will work best for your price range.

        • Wow, thanks. I am going to check that out.

          I've been dumbfounded by how a renowned company like HP, and a company in the printer business, can make such an unbelievable piece of *#(&*@%(*&@@ software that their scanpro or what not is. It's like using a Model-T, with careful nudges, and coaxing, and a few crash/reboots later, I am able to scan my expenses. And before that, HP was great for hiding it's drivers, so while I had an ancient but reliable LaserJet III, I could only get it working under

    • by Cwix ( 1671282 )

      Its global warming, the hotter it gets up here, the colder it gets down there.

    • Every asia hardware vendor smells the "AppStore" revenues, HP is getting ready WebOS for their next-gen devices (leaving MS behind). They all want to emulate Apple's business model -- the embedded software app store for added value. Even Intel is preparing their own OS to get piece of the action now, see, MS is in trouble.
  • by h00manist ( 800926 ) on Saturday January 22, 2011 @04:37PM (#34967618) Journal
    So Microft and HP joined up to hype some stuff. Big news.
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You're so cynical. Look how well the big HP/Intel collaboration (Itanium) worked out. And, of course, Microsoft has a sterling record when it comes to joint ventures, or adoption of other people's technology. Java, for example.
    • And sell you stuff that is dead out of box, crashes VERY frequently, and/or fails at an alarming rate.
  • Slashdot (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by oldhack ( 1037484 )
    You know, slashdot isn't much different from gawkers or all the other gossip site, eh.
  • HP is already the (somewhat distant) #2 player in high-end UNIX and proprietary systems, after IBM. I don't think they have that much interest in scale-out commodity Lintel/Wintel crap.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      HP is already the (somewhat distant) #2 player in high-end UNIX and proprietary systems, after IBM. I don't think they have that much interest in scale-out commodity Lintel/Wintel crap.

      I'm sure HP isn't interested [hp.com] at all [hp.com] in the Linux on Intel [hp.com]. :-/

      • Lintel/Wintel are not normally used to refer to Itanium, which is what your first link refers to. The third link appears to be some ancient crap that hasn't been updated in years, given the references to the Spec2000 benchmark and Sun, and the frequent file-not-found errors.
      • An Itanium link? I didn't know they were still making those.
        • An Itanium link? I didn't know they were still making those.

          Better known as the Itanic. So mod me troll!

    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      They care about the 'commodity' stuff, and HP and IBM trade back and fourth for '#1' in that space, and even if margins are low on the systems (but still no where near as slim as many x86 vendors), they make gobs in services and such.

      Calling HP the 'new' giant is odd given they are not particularly any more giant than they were a month ago, or a year ago.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 22, 2011 @04:47PM (#34967692)

    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.

    • Hurd got tossed in a Mata-Hari, that has now claimed control of the BOD. Mata-Hari didn't act on her own. What we see here is the hand behind the strings. Hp is hosed.
    • by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      HP seems really fond of what I call "irrelevance campaigns". They keep having them with a myriad of vendors and, despite any concrete 'excellence' in any one area they're focusing on, push them hard for a short period of time then drop them like they're hot. Sometimes it's the result of a purchase/merger, new product, or some other such thing, but the result is almost always the same:

      * HP branded Citrix XenServer (preinstalled)
      * HP 'mini' netbooks (good deal while they lasted, but then they hiked the price

  • by The O Rly Factor ( 1977536 ) on Saturday January 22, 2011 @04:58PM (#34967768)
    I don't really think HP-UX, HP's proprietary bastard child of System V and Tru64, can be called "Linux"
    • by RotateLeftByte ( 797477 ) on Saturday January 22, 2011 @05:04PM (#34967806)

      That's why it's called 'HP-SUX' even by people who work there.

    • WHile HP-UX isn't going anywhere (HP-UX 11iV4 and 11iV5 are planned), it hasn't really been HP's biggest area of sales growth. While they expect to keep HP-UX on Integrity for a while, the company's main server strategy has switched to Linux on Intel, Linux on Integrity (Itanium) and Windows on Intel.

      • And VMS! They still sell it, but I was talking to someone who worked in HP's operating systems research group a couple of years ago, and she'd never heard of VMS, so obviously they're not advertising it very well...
      • by Rudolf ( 43885 )

        Linux on Intel, Linux on Integrity (Itanium)
        Itanium is Intel

  • That these appliances will crash often and fall apart after a year of normal use?
  • Neither company has done much worth watching recently - so there's no reason to think that their combining forces is likely to produce anything particularly noteworthy.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Business majors need to recite this every morning without fail: synergy never happens, synergy never happens, synergy never happens...

      • Business majors need to recite this every morning without fail: synergy never happens, synergy never happens, synergy never happens...

        I dunno, it seems to have happened a lot with Google's acquisitions. OTOH, rather than just mouth some platitudes about synergy and expecting it to magically happen as they downsize, when Google buys someone with a product service where they expect to acheive some kind of synergies, they seem to throw a bunch of technical resources into integrating the product or service with Google's existing offerings to acheive synergies.

        Synergies happen only if you take the step beyond recognizing the potential for syne

  • .... as they seek to counteract the growing hardware and software dominance of IBM and Oracle.

    Shouldn't that be "... the increasing irrelevance of IBM and Oracle?"

    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      I admittedly haven't seen much new Sun gear in places even before the takeover, and have heard some complaints about service problems after the Oracle acquisition. Oracle software, however, still has a very large presence with no sign of slowing. Oracle DB software is still deployed even in a whole lot of places where PostgreSQL or MySQL would be perfectly sufficient.

      IBM I don't see as losing any clout in the enterprise space. The only mainframe game to speak of (legacy is a large reason for it, but thos

  • A revolutionary new printer that prints only BSODs.

  • If they merge you get a complete company. They could put Windows on top of Unix on top of HP hardware and make something that can compete with the Mac. They could do real mobile versions of Office and have something that can compete with iPad. Put all their phone stuff together, you might get to something that matches the 2007 iPhone.

    The kit era is over. The build whatever PC you want as long as it runs Windows era is over. Most users today are not nerds, most buyers are not I-T. You need to make complete,

  • Doesnt that sound ominous and concerning ...
  • Another company with shitty products and consumer lock-in?
  • As someone from Microsoft who works closely with a team at HP building the actual appliances mentioned discussed here, I'd love more feedback on the HP Business Decision Appliance (HPBDA) mentioned here. The appliance is designed to support 80-150 concurrent PowerPivot users (doing what we call Self-Service BI) in a 1U server (24 cores/96GB memory) with all the storage required inside the appliance. The appliance is configured to provide backup storage initially. The HPBDA from cardboard box to producti

    • All I know is that HP is my LAST choice. Every time I deal with them I become angry. When I make purchasing decisions, which has been the case at several of my places of employment, HP is not in the running for anything. When they shipped me a laptop with a GPU die bonding problem and I had to spend over 24 hours on the phone in total to get it replaced, even though I managed to get confirmation from a tech lead that it was their fault, I knew that it was over. When you have to abuse your customers to profi

    • Britt

      Feedback -- sure, why not. But, it has to be in the form of questions.

      1 - does your powerpivot appliance work with IBM ISAS appliances?
      2 - does your powerpivot appliance work with IBM BCU?
      3 - how does your appliance interoperate with Ab Initio? McSource? COGNOS? (8.4 and 10). If a customer has, say 6000 or more ETL jobs running with Ab Initio, and wants to start adding powerpivot functionality, is your appliance represented by a new GUI box to simply drag-and-drop in that environment?
      4 - your appliance

  • A partneship with MS can only lead to one outcome... I won't miss HP a lot, except for not finding ink for my printer anymore.

  • Intel wants to buy McAfee, HP and Microsoft cooperates. Is this hardware + software cooperation a trend? Is this because growth seems to happen on all other arenas than the traditional PC?

    In the mid 90's Microsoft and Intel relied on each other to drive one another's sales, a symbiosis they formalized for a while, but "parted as friends" in the late 90's if I recall correctly.

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