Inside the Microsoft HP deal

The $250 million figure in the announcement was to be spread across joint R&D, go-to-market strategies and sales campaigns.  

The two vendors claim to have 32,000 frontline channel partners between them. They intend to expand the number of partners selling solutions by running big marketing campaigns. The actual number was not revealed, except that it would be 10 times the usual investment in marketing.

HP was also planning to "increase the capability" of its 11,000 certified Microsoft professionals through strategy workshops.

Farrand said HP would add "new, dedicated headcount" to sell solutions. "There will be dedicated personnel that sell these solutions. The existing sales force will be trained on higher levels of expertise, then they will call in the experts to provide additional information. I'm not talking numbers today," said Farrand.

Microsoft and HP's collaboration on cloud computing was partly mundane - Microsoft revealing it used modified HP hardware in its Azure-supporting data centres.

"We work very closely with HP to build servers in a specific way. They are super-tuned to run that Azure platform," said Brad Anderson, corporate vice president, management and services division, Microsoft. The vendors were making joint investments to build more infrastructure for the data centre.

However, the vendors also said they would be jointly training their professional services organisations to help customers modernise their applications for cloud computing.

"A big part of this is application modernisation. We are working with customers and partners to understand how you update and build new applications to run in the cloud," said Anderson.

"Cloud apps will be always available, self-tuning, self-optimising and have capacity on demand. Both of our professional services organisations will be fully trained to help customers build applications along those lines."