Microsoft and HP join UC hosted service trend

Microsoft and HP announced a major partnership in unified communications (UC) building on HP’s ProCurve blades and Microsoft’s UC and collaboration software tools. The two companies articulated a vision of communications as something more virtualized than tied to an appliance, a story that’s not unlike that being told by Cisco and one likely to be advanced further by Oracle. The deal is most likely a part of the overall trend we’ve discussed before; IT and networking players are fighting for the middle zone of hosted service features where much of the future value of both networking and IT will lie.