HP And Microsoft Jointly Develop BI And Data Warehouse Appliances

HP has introduced a line of appliances specially designed and configured to run Microsoft business software, including Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server, in order to deliver business intelligence and data warehousing technology to business and enterprise customers. The appliances are designed to be easy to deploy and to avoid the complexity that frustrates IT staffs trying to match hardware and software on their own.

On Wednesday HP introduced the HP Business Decision Appliance, which is available now through HP/Microsoft Frontline channel partners for just under $28,000, plus the cost of software licenses for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

Also available now is the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, which starts at about $2 million, plus the cost of the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse software license, introduced in November 2010.

Due in March is the HP E5000 Messaging System, which will run Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. Pricing for this appliance will start at $36,000, plus the software license. HP plans to introduce the HP Business Data Warehouse appliance in June, but did not disclose pricing information.

The product introductions are the result of a collaboration that HP and Microsoft announced one year ago to jointly spend $250 million to develop appliances that combine HP hardware and Microsoft software, as well as HP system management software, such as HP System Insight Manager. The goal of the collaboration is to deliver appliances with software pre-installed and pre-configured to optimize the appliance for best performance and to make implementation as easy as possible, says Jim Ganthier, vice president of marketing for HP's Industry Standard Servers and Software division.HP cites Standish Group industry research that said only 32 percent of IT projects designed to deliver critical business applications are rated as "successful" by the IT staff that implemented them, due to complexity issues. The appliances are based on HP's DL 360 G7 servers.

The collaboration between HP and Microsoft benefits HP because it delivers to market a data warehouse appliance that should be more successful than HP's Neoview line, says Forrester analyst Jim Kobielus. Sales of Neoview appliances, introduced about four years ago, have been weak, as HP was bested by players such as Vertica Systems and Greenplum, which was acquired by EMC last year. "It's essentially a well-known failure," Kobielus says.

The partnership benefits Microsoft, he continues, by giving it a competitive data warehousing and business analytics product to match that of its software competitors. "Now Microsoft has a high-end data warehousing appliance that can duke it out with Oracle Exadata and IBM Smart Analytics systems," Kobielus says.