HP, Oracle Team Up to Sell Midmarket Software Bundles

In its quest to organize its own business based on customers' technology goals, Hewlett-Packard has teamed up with Oracle to develop bundles of hardware, software and services for midmarket customers.

The offer is also geared to partners who want to beef up the HP-Oracle bundles with their own industry expertise and then resell those to customers.

HP and Oracle announced Oct. 16 that the two companies have developed hardware and software bundles that consist of products from Oracle's Accelerate program—which is Oracle's strategy to bring in more partners that will in turn sell to the midmarket—and HP's reference configurations.

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HP's reference configurations (for Oracle) are guidelines for HP servers, storage and software that are based on joint best practices culled from both Oracle and HP engineers.

Accelerate is essentially prepackaged application bundles geared toward certain vertical industries, along with rapid implementation tools, templates and process flows from Oracle.

HP's servers are designed and integrated with a number of software vendors—Citrix, Microsoft, Sage Software, SAP and VMware—with bundles geared toward midmarket customers. The movement, mirrored by other companies in the software and hardware sector, is an effort to make products more about solving business problems than fitting into a specific product niche or software silo.

Read about HP's new online software management service here.

Customers are starting to organize around a business process, according to AMR Research analyst Bill Swanton. "They've learned from ERP [enterprise resource planning] that they have to think of things as business processes," said Swanton, in Boston. "To get any level of optimization across the enterprise you have to look at the whole piece, so teams are organized by processes, like order-to-cash."

HP, for example, announced in September that rather than have a server group or a data warehouse group, it is organizing itself into groups based on the business goals for which technology is part of the solution.

The groups, called Business Information Optimization, Business Technology Optimization and Adaptive Infrastructure, are organized around helping companies do certain tasks that might be bundled. The BTO group, for example, provides an Integrated Archive platform that stores billions of e-mails, documents and images for easy search and retrieval for electronic data discovery, governance and compliance.

Oracle, with its Application Integration Architecture that it announced last April, is building industry reference models and tools for integrating functionality across its applications based on processes, rather than software silos such as CRM (customer relationship management) or SRM (supplier relationship management).

"Certainly this is something that a lot of companies are wrestling with now," said Swanton.

"People aren't buying hardware and software; they're buying a solution to a business problem. If you package that in that way, it's easy to price on what you are saving a company—you're selling value as opposed to selling parts," Swanton said.

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