Microsoft, HP Do Right by Partners

Microsoft, HP Do Right by Partners

In the closing months of 2009, as the world tried to close the books on a terrible year, Cisco Systems tapped Avnet and WestCon to distributed its blade servers and enable resellers to go to market with the foundational building blocks of its Unified Computing Systems. The announcement was the culmination of nearly nine-months of waiting for a tangible, widespread channel development to come from Cisco’s “Project California.”

"With the incredible amount of convergence taking place within the data center, it is critical to provide customers with complete solutions designed to address their business challenges," Jeff Bawol, president of Avnet Technology Solutions for the Americas, said in a statement.

Earlier this week, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard announced a three-year, $250 million collaborative alliance to develop new, highly integrated and optimized data center solutions came with promises of new products and opportunities for partners as well as offerings that bread-and-butter resellers could take to market today. While the Microsoft-HP initiative is applicable to environments ranging from the Global 2000, the optimal market target is organizations with 50 to 1,000 seats.

“We’re not going to create things that have inherit value, but build a platform that partner can add value to,” Ross Brown, Microsoft’s vice president of solutions partners, told Channel Insider this week.

The two initiatives are not only contrasting approaches to winning the battle for the future data center and cloud computing infrastructure, but a polar opposite approach to engaging reseller partners in going to market with emerging technologies and strategies. Understanding these two initiatives – the inevitable number of similar initiatives by other vendors yet to come – is critical for VARs and solution providers in knowing their place in the channel of the future.

Cisco’s Project California was perhaps the worst kept secret in IT history. For months leading up to the announcement, the industry buzzed with speculation and rumors about Cisco’s server market entry to compete directly against longtime allies Dell, IBM, Sun Microsystems and HP. When Cisco took the wraps off its plans last March, it was explicit in its intent to go to market direct with its virtualized servers and converged data center strategy, develop strategic working relationships with a handful of large integrators and, over time, push the technology and product offerings out to rank and file reseller partners.

Cisco did work with partners such as Dimension Data, Tata Consultancy Services, World Wide Technology, Computer Science Corp., in fleshing out the USC strategy and bringing the concept to early adopting enterprise. But Cisco was light on details for what the products actually looked like and how the strategy would manifest itself through the rest of its broad channels. In response to cries from smaller partners and – as some speculated – the need to push new products to offset declining sales in core infrastructure gear, Cisco announced at its partner conference last June that it would release conventional rack-mount servers.

From the state, the Cisco data center strategy was slow in unfolding to its partners. And Cisco can’t be faulted for this build up since its UCS strategy is based in complexity – pulling together numerous hardware, software and services components from multiple vendors is no easy matter. The Microsoft-HP deal, however, is based entirely in simplicity and, conversely, leverages the two vendor’s vast partner communities out of the gate.

First, let’s clarify what the Microsoft-HP initiative is really about.