HP to provide Microsoft Office 365 business services, support
HP will sell Microsoft's Office 365 coupled with HP services as a single enterprise bundle, HP announced on December 2 at the company's HP Discover conference.
HP's new offering, called HP Enterprise Services for Office 365, provides Office 365 business customers with HP services, support and expanded datacenter location options.
The HP services tailored for Office 365 that are available include front-end planning/advisory services; administration services for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online; setup of these services hosted in Microsoft datacenters; assistance with any required Active Directory cleanup; ongoing support of these various online services, including incident and problem management; compliance and audit services; change management services; capacity management and performance reporting services and more.
The agreement also allows Microsoft to host certain Microsoft cloud services in HP's datacenters, starting with Exchange Online.
HP is touting the bundle as providing "enterprise-grade IT at a fraction of the cost to run it yourself."
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"This gives you a single, cloud-based solution with end-to-end accountability from the two largest providers in the industry," according to HP.
HP's Enterprise Services division and Microsoft announced a four-year agreement around Office 365 back in 2011 to sell public and private-cloud solutions built around Microsoft Office 365 and its on-premises server counterparts.
The agreement announced today is "a new agreement with Microsoft, on top of the existing relationship," an HP spokesperson confirmed. "The agreement allows HP to comprehensively manage Office 365 and related HP services for enterprise customers. This agreement also allows agreed-upon HP datacenters to be used by Microsoft for Office 365 email hosting."
HP officials said the company has 48,000-plus Microsoft-trained professionals on staff, and that its services unit currently supports 1 million SharePoint and 850,000 Office Communications Server/Lync seats. The company also is touting that it manages more than 45 million mailboxes, including Microsoft Exchange, Notes, and Zimbra.