Microsoft hooks up with HP on unified comms

FRESH FROM THE press release printer comes news of a Microsoft/HP hookup, with the pair, like so many couples, making it official in Vegas today, inking a four year partnership at Interop 2009 around end-to-end unified enterprise communications.

The deal, which will see up to $180 million in joint investments funneled into it, will purportedly span everything from messaging, to video conferencing to telecommunications as well as spawn a smorgasbord of devices and connected apps.

"Truly unified communications," said Microsoft business division president, Stephen Elop, "means one click to communicate, one click to conference, one click to collaborate."

What this means is that the Vole's Office SharePoint Server, Exchange Server and Office Communications Server will all have to play nice with HP's ProCurve, and HP will have to get itself a Microsoft unified communications qualification for its IP desk phones, smartphones and the HP dx9000 TouchSmart Business PC too. In addition, HP will have to update its Business Technology Optimisation (BTO) service to support Microsoft Office Communications Server.

Also, seeing as it's a "strategic global partnership" as opposed to just any old casual coupling, the pair will be blissfully hammering out product development, integration, services , marketing and even sales together.

This also means HP and the Vole will be pooling hardware, networking, software and services to bring us unified coms with all the security and stability of Windows for your phone system. Sigh. µ