Transformers waking up at HP

MUMBAI, INDIA: May be a printer is not exactly unfolding and walking around as a giant soldier but hearing out Jim Merritt, Senior VP, Enterprise Group and MD, APAC, Japan gives a surreal feeling during his keynote at least.

As he shared the journey HP's innovation radar has been through and has pegged for 2014 and onwards, Merritt hammered one point well - new styles of IT is the way to go.

The word 'The Machine 2014' kept bobbing conspicuously in the sea of trends he shared. It would indeed be a good idea to see IT turn a very big and very new page as we move on.

For HP's part, the way forward spells out universal memory, photonics and special purpose core processor servers as of now.

He first cited how HP has moved a long way through innovations like RISC chips (1986), 64-bit architectures (1994), smart cooling (2003) to Moonshot in 2013. "The new style of IT should be flexible, converged, hybrid and Opex-based instead of being siloed, complex, rigid and capex-led. But the problem is that basic compute has not changed much when you look at general processors, copper connectors, tiers of memory and storage."

That's how and why HP's innovation graph will now show stuff like photonics and universal memory pool. While Photonics is being explained as a way to eliminate copper and sort out distance issues, universal memory pool is claimed as a dramatic way to reduce rack space and KW levels considerably along with simpler programming as well as better performance levels. The intention is to move these innovations to real action and bring it to market in four to five years, he mentioned.

Later, at this 3rd World Tour that is happening in India after Tokyo and S'pore, Bruce Dahlgren, Senior VP, Enterprise Services reminded how as per a study done with IDC, IT budgets galavanize around optimisation to 60 to 80 per cent levels and only 0 to 10 per cent go in transformation bucket, 5 to 25 per cent for change and 0 to 5 per cent in R & D. The idea with new innovation and its application at HP is to spin this to a state where optimisation covers 35 to 50 per cent and transformation at 18 to 25 per cent.

Transformers always make an entertaining and thrilling plot. If HP can print these new scripts well, this would be another good page-turner for IT ahead.