HP and Microsoft signed an agreement last week to jointly work towards the cloud computing opportunity. The two companies will invest $ 250 million as part of the three-year agreement.

According to the alliance, their offering will be industry’s most comprehensive technology stack integration to date – from infrastructure to application – and is intended to substantially improve the customer experience for developing, deploying and managing IT environments.

The two will jointly work towards areas such as for data management machines; converged, prepackaged application solutions; comprehensive virtualization offerings; and integrated management tools.

 “Driving innovation helps businesses establish a competitive advantage,” says Mark Hurd, HP chairman and chief executive officer. “This collaboration will allow HP and Microsoft to offer our customers transformative technology that will reduce costs, generate business growth and accelerate innovation.”

The infrastructure-to-applications model will cater to large data centres as well as the SME segment and are available with immediate effect.

The new infrastructure-to-application model from

“This agreement, which spans hardware, software and services, will enable business customers to optimize performance with push-button simplicity at the lowest-possible total cost of ownership,” comments Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer, Microsoft Corp. “Our extended partnership will transform the way large enterprises deliver services to their customers, and help smaller organizations adopt IT to grow their businesses. Microsoft and HP are betting on each other so our customers don’t have to gamble on IT.”