I’m attending HP Discover here in Barcelona for a couple days as a blogger and attending a number of coffee talks. I thought you’d be interested in some of the topics.
HP Labs focus on The Machine
First up was a coffee talk by the HP Labs team – Ruth Bergman who runs the Analytics Lab in Israel, Souvik Sen who works on Networking and Rycharde Hawkes who works in the Cloud and Security Lab in Bristol, England.
The Labs have 5 themes 5 labs – Systems, Networking, Cloud Security, Analytics, Content Delivery and employ between 400 and 500 people.
About half the Las are working on aspects of the Machine – an entirely new type of system which will use new components such as ‘memristors’ as discussed by CTO and Head of HP Labs Martin Fink earlier in the year. This is of course a major hardware subject and something helping to focus the research team. It’s also doing lots of work on software subjects as well of course.
Ruth talked about the Analytics work her team is doing for the Machine being in 2 areas – one involving undertaking Big Data challenges which can’t be handled on today’s computers; the second is taking todays programmes and fitting them to the new architecture.
Souvik talked about the work his team is doing on improving Wireless protocols and research that’s going into HP Location, while Rycharde talked about the need for visualisation techniques for Big Data systems. On the up-coming split of HP, like the rest of the company Labs are working through it. There are clearly developments in the PC and printer areas that could be split off, but it’s clearly too early to tell what will happen organisationally.
The Server Team Expects 2015 Growth
The second coffee talk was from HP’s worldwide server team including Krista Satterwaite (Moonshot), John Gromala (Hyperscale), McLeod Glass (Rack and Tower) and Paul Durzan (Blades). There was a lot of discussion about Moonshot, where the most traction seems to be around the Hosted Desktop, Citrix XenApp and Wed-in-a-box configurations. It transpires that the EvoRAIL solution already announced will become available once fitted to the new Gen9 servers in the Spring. Perhaps surprisingly we did not discuss many of the other new servers launched at the show today. It has seen a shift in emphasis to Service Providers as customers, having seen replacement cycles grow from 3 to 4 or even 5 years in recent years. On market growth in 2015 the team believes that the Windows Server 2003 refresh, easing of the recession and its strong Gen9 servers will give it revenue growth. In terms of competition it believes that System x customers are confused in the move from IBM to Lenovo, especially with IBM keeping the maintenance business; it hasn’t yet seen much competition from IBM Power servers running little-endian Linux and thinks that Dell’s FX2, although similar in ways to Moonshot, is not as cost-optimised as its own industry standard servers.