HP and Microsoft Corporation announced a three-year agreement to invest €172 million to significantly simplify technology environments for businesses of all sizes.

With this strategic partnership, HP and Microsoft, plan to deliver new solutions that will be built on a next-generation infrastructure-to-application model, which will help advance cloud computing by speeding application implementation, and eliminate complexities of IT management and automate existing manual processes to lower the overall costs.

This agreement represents the industry's most comprehensive technology stack integration to date and will substantially improve the customer experience for developing, deploying and managing IT environments, HP said.

These dynamic IT solutions will provide increased business efficiency, improved application performance, enhanced operations, investment protection and low total cost of ownership.

The joint solutions are built on industry standards and are designed to utilise existing data centre investments, all managed through a common framework. This approach is designed to enable customers to integrate private or public cloud computing models as their business requires.

HP and Microsoft will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform, with HP and Microsoft offering services, and Microsoft continuing to invest in HP hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.

HP and Microsoft Frontline channel partners will increase their global investment by 10 times to drive new opportunities for the 32,000 HP and Microsoft Frontline channel partners. Through more than 11,000 Microsoft-certified HP professionals worldwide, HP Services, in partnership with Microsoft Services, will support the entire integrated hardware and software solution from simple implementations to the most critical enterprise infrastructure.

Service offerings include strategy workshops and business value services, application modernisation services, planned customised Business Intelligence Solutions and assistance for customers.