UPDATED 17:29 EDT / JUNE 09 2011

Prith Banerjee Lifts the Curtain on HP Labs

Earlier this week SiliconAngle Founder John Furrier sat down with HP Labs Director and HP Senior VP Prith Banerjee for a lengthy interview covering a variety of important and fascinating subjects. The recording of the interview is available here, and the full transcription is published here.

The interview ranged over a list of subjects including the reorganization of the labs into eight prescient major subject areas, , some of the projects it is working on, and the strong support that new HP CEO Leo Apotheker is giving to the Labs

When Banerjee came to HP Labs four years ago, he brought in a reorganization that created eight research teams focused on: printing and content delivery, mobility, cloud and security, information analytics, intelligent infrastructure, networking and communications, services, and sustainability.

Although usually thought of as a computer company by the general public, HP is also a major manufacturer of printing presses and other equipment. The thrust of technology in this area, Banerjee said, is the transition from analog to digital printing and multi-platform content delivery, with the same finished books, magazines, and newspapers being printed on paper and published to smartphones and tablets.

In the area of mobility, HP Labs believes that employees should be able to use a single device for their personal lives and for their work. The big problem with that is security – IT is rightfully concerned that allowing these personal devices onto the company network opens the door for a variety of security issues. HP is working on technology that will separate the consumer and business environments on the mobile device, solving the problem and potentially ending the conflict between IT and users.

In the area of cloud and security, HP Labs is working on several interesting projects, including ways to increase security and technology to allow seamless integration of public and internal, private cloud, services. Many of HP’s customers are in some stage of building private clouds, and while they want to keep most of their applications and data in-house the want to use public cloud resources for peak load computing. “Why shouldn’t that transition be seamless?” Banerjee asks.

Information analytics is focused on handling the gigantic amounts of data from the Web and other sources flooding HP customers. That data is 80% unstructured and doubling every 18 months, and it needs to be captured and analyzed at the speed that business operates at, not on a six month schedule. Since HP’s acquisition of Verdata, this group has been working with Verdata’s design team to incorporate its technology into the next generation HP big data solution.

Intelligent infrastructure is a particularly fascinating area. Banerjee revealed that HP Labs is developing nano-sensors that can be distributed throughout enterprise IT infrastructure to sense and report on events in great detail. This near-future development – HP Labs is already working with one customer in the oil and gas industry to use nano-sensors to monitor its equipment – will in itself create a big data analysis challenge that will be an early application of the systems the analytics group is developing.

In networking and communications HP Labs is working on next-generation networking technology.

Services is focusing on applying multiple technologies to improve the delivery of services in several business vertical areas.

Finally in the area of sustainability, HP Labs has designed the “Net Zero Data Center” which over a three-to-five year period generates and supplies as much energy to the electrical grid, using solar, biofuels, and other sustainable technologies, as it takes from the grid. So far instance during the day it uses solar to generate more power than it consumes, and sells the extra to the grid. Then at night it draws power from the grid. It is now working on scaling that to design the “Net Zero City”.

“These are societal problems, and we believe that once you solve them the business results will follow,” he says.

The enthusiasm that new HP CEO Leo Apotheker has shown for HP Labs is invigorating the entire staff, Banerjee said. Apotheker visited the labs on the day he joined HP, eight months ago, and plans to come back soon to take a deeper dive into what the Labs is doing.

“In the Summit on March 14, in his introductory paragraph, he talked about innovations that came out of HP labs” including StoreOne, nanoscale sensors, and memristors. This level of support from the CEO has energized the entire staff, Banerjee said, and they are excited about getting to show him some of the things they are doing when he makes his second visit.

Overall, Baterjee promises, HP Labs is going forward with a variety of next-generation technologies that will equate directly into products that will keep the company on the cutting edge for the foreseeable future.

 

 


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