What I saw at HP World Tour 2014

HP is focusing on the four megatrends: Cloud, Big Data, Mobility, Security which to a great extent are common across all vertical industries (some may put more focus on a particular trend) and should not be just an HP’s silo view but also the hot topics among other technology vendors currently.

They introduced Helion which is based on OpenStack architecture to implement private cloud, hybrid cloud and eventually move to public cloud. They now have the community edition of Helion and will soon launch the commercial edition.

They showcased Moonshot SDN (Software Defined Network) architecture which they claim to be able to reduce DC footprint, energy consumption, cooling, etc. by as much as 90%. They said hp.com (300M hits per day) used to be supported on 10 full racks. With Moonshot they have reduced it to half a rack.

This rack supports 1000 VMs. Do you have such a big appetite?

Mobility – HP used not to be an active player in the MDM/MAM space but they now introduce HP Anywhere. Not much details were revealed at the event. I believe if your organization already has some sort of MDM solution then there is no rush to look at it.

They also gave their vision on Internet of Things (IoT) – some of the crazy ideas such as Internet enabled coffee maker, fridge, running shoes, pill (medicine), contact lens, toothbrush, and all sorts of Wearables that Google and other manufacturers are actively developing in their R&D lab. But one important note is that all these relate to how people perceive and consume technology. They want it to be contextual (knows what they need, only gives specific and relevant information when they need it) and immersive (blending physical and digital worlds together). One example of immersion technology is the 3D Telepresence system which brings this “real human” look and feel. Bear in mind Telepresence products have been brought to the market since 10 years ago!

PC Hardware – They have launched the latest business laptop Elitebook 1040, Pro X2 410 which is a convertible (tablet + laptop), HP Slate Android devices, Chromebook, and Slate Pro Android desktop. They highlighted a security feature called SureStart which is a built-in TPM based security function of the BIOS to self-heal / self-recover from a malicious attack. SureStart seems a promising technology to combat nowadays cyber threats considering the increasing sophistication of these attacks that can even target at non-OS components.

HP Cloud Portfolio – From compute (VM, VDI, a.k.a. Rent-the-Core) to Storage, Networking, Content Delivery, DNS, HP is offering a wide range of service offerings to meet the increasing demand on Cloud based services.