HP and Microsoft team up for improved communications and collaboration

David Spark reporting for Riverbed at Interop '09 in Las Vegas, NV.

No single company can provide solutions for all your IT needs. And that was the message Microsoft and HP wanted to drive home with their new collaboration announcement during their keynote presentation on the first official day of Interop in Las Vegas. 

Marius Haas, Senior Vice President and General Manager, HP ProCurve Networking, HP, opened the keynote. Haas said what HP is hearing from their customers is that networking is far too proprietary, complicated, and it's the most expensive line item in their budget. Customers are feeling hostage to their networking decisions.

Haas said that HP is taking a stand to change the networking environment. With Microsoft, the two companies are making a new alliance and increased investments in unified communications and collaboration.

Ann Livermore, Executive Vice President, Technology Solutions Group, HP, and Stephen Elop, President, Microsoft Business Division, joined Haas on stage.

Livermore said that HP is announcing the delivery of a unified communications solution in collaboration with Microsoft Office Communications Server that will be optimized on a variety of HP's hardware platforms.

Microsoft gave a live presentation of some of the new capabilities with the new communications and collaboration platform:

• While you can deliver voicemail to your Outlook Inbox, the new solution can also do a speech-to-text conversion to your inbox. Instead of just seeing that you've got a voicemail in your inbox, then requiring you to log in and listen to find out what the message is, you can just read it.
• Set up projects on the Web with all team members. See status of projects, documents, and team members.
• Connect with available team members using Office Communicator, Microsoft's presence/instant messenger program. Contact team members, by real name, through any method: IM, voice call, and video call. Plus, you can do conference calls on the fly. Simply drag and drop people into the conversation and they're added to the text, voice, or video call.
• Full document sharing. Relinquish control to other users during a conference call.
• High quality video conferencing with standard desktops and webcams.
• Embedded in a Microsoft application is a workflow task. Edit a document, and within the document you can update the task (that told you to edit the document) so the rest of the people in your group can see changes you made.

They finished the presentation with a desktop video conference connecting Bangalore, Singapore, and Las Vegas. InformationWeek has more on this story.

For more, check out all of Riverbed's Interop '09 Las Vegas coverage.