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 it is actually a very powerful and compelling solution for risk averse enterprise customers. Do not underestimate how CIOs treat risk where their critical applications are concerned. It is undoubtedly 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, it was the only player on the field in a position to make that offer.

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

I’d 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 has .net, Oracle have Jas. Microsoft plays 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.

Read more of Steve’s blog entries at The Hot Aisle.

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