Microsoft and HPE Further Relationship To Expand The Hybrid Cloud

This year, at HPE’s Discover conference in London, Scott Guthrie joined Antonio Neri of HPE on stage to share how the two companies are expanding their relationship that was announced last year. Announced last year was that HPE would recommend Azure to its clients for cloud services and in return, Microsoft named HPE a preferred provider of the platform.

During the past year, the two companies have collaborated on Hyper-Converged systems based on Microsoft’s Cloud Platform System standard and a few months ago, HPE announced an upcoming Azure stack solution that will make it easier for companies who are interested in, or are moving towards a hybrid environment, transition faster. Finally, HPE also has its consulting arm that is helping customers transition from on-premises to hybrid and full cloud environments.

This year, the two companies have announced a joint innovation center that will host workshops to help customers’ setup Azure Stack solutions. The first center is in Seattle with plans to open another center in Europe in the near future.

Seeing as HPE is in a transition mode, where the company is shifting how it operates and is streamlining its operations, partnerships like the one with Microsoft are a critical component to its evolving strategy. While HPE is working to become the leader in the hybrid IT environment, they are also becoming Azure Stack specialists which has a long-tailed future as Azure becomes more dominant in the cloud space.