A large percentage of IT projects involving solution providers in the channel get derailed for one reason or another during the installation process, largely because of unforeseen integration issues.

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard are trying to take the uncertainty out of that process by making good on a promise the two companies made last year to greatly simplify the deployment of Microsoft enterprise software.

The two companies announced a series of business intelligence, data warehouse and messaging appliances that will be deployed on HP hardware.

Steve Tramack, Senior Engineering Manager, ESSN Alliances, Performance and Solutions Engineering at HP, says the two companies have created a series of affordable turnkey appliances that are intended to make Microsoft software more accessible to a broader range of customers that previously would have been challenged by integration issues typically associated with these classes of applications.

Fausto Ibarra, Microsoft senior director for business intelligence adds that by working with HP, Microsoft expects that the number of IT projects that don’t come to fruition because of deployment challenges will drop considerably, resulting in higher rates of successful IT deployments across the industry.

 These appliances represent the latest manifestation on an ongoing industry trend. That trend, however, is continuing to evolve because of the advances in virtualization that will result in more software being deployed on “virtual appliances” based on virtual machines. This will give solution providers in the channel greater choice in terms of the hardware they want to deploy these appliances on, while still preserving the turnkey nature of an appliance.

It may take a while for this virtual appliance trend to play out across the entire enterprise application stack, but eventually it will.