Today Microsoft and HP announced an expanded partnership in order to deliver fully integrated application to hardware stacks. It’s a brilliant move, absolutely stunningly smart and spot on for HP.

I wrote about Oracle VM and the fully integrated stack that Larry Ellison has been promoting to his customers. Superficially it might seem like a piece of vendor lock in but actually it is a very powerful and compelling solution for risk adverse enterprise customers. Do not underestimate how CIOs treat risk where their critical applications are concerned. It is undoubtably the number one driver and motivator.

By offering a single, fully supported (at the source code level) stack I believe Oracle got it right.  For a while they have been the only player on the field to be in a position to make that offer.

Today HP and Microsoft became the second fully integrated stack in play.

I better explain what I mean by a fully integrated stack it includes the following layers

• Application
• Middleware and Database
• Programming language and framework
• Operating System
• Hypervisor
• Hardware

VCE (VMware, Cisco and EMC) and Citrix play in this space too but have too many missing parts to be fully vertically integrated.

So VMware have the largest market share and a ton of trained VMware engineers in the field but there are more Microsoft MCSE guys out there and everyone understand Proliant,

The biggest point is who wins the ISV and developer mindshare? Microsoft have .net, Oracle have Java. Microsoft play better with developers than Oracle but maybe Larry can learn a bit from Sun about winning Java mindshare?

If I was Larry, I would borrow some Iranian nukes and bomb the EU, if I was VMware or Citrix I would be sucking up to developers like crazy.  Mark Hurd is definitely feeling smug, very smug today.