Accenture revealed that it has hired IT superstar Prith Banerjee to head its research and development arm, which “looks at the future of enterprise IT and makes recommendations for how companies can take advantage of technology.”

As the new managing director of Global Technology Research & Development for Accenture’s Technology Growth Platform, Banerjee will direct the writing of the consultancy’s Technology Vision report, an annual paper that the lists the seven most influential trends in IT. The most recent edition, which was published in February this year, named data velocity, software-defined networking and cloud as three of the top technologies that CIOs can’t afford to ignore. SiliconAngle has been covering these trends and others extensively.

“I couldn’t be more pleased to welcome Prith Banerjee to Accenture,” said Paul Daugherty, Accenture’s chief technology officer. “As a well-respected academic, computer scientist, and senior executive, Prith brings an exceptional level of industry knowledge and global perspective on the technology marketplace. Turning technology innovation into business results is imperative to remaining competitive and Prith will play an instrumental role in helping our clients leverage the latest technology solutions.”

Banerjee, who holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois, joined Accenture from the ABB Group, where he served as chief information officer. Prior to his stint at the engineering firm he was charged with running HP Labs, Hewlett-Packard’s famed R&D division.

SiliconAngle founder and Editor-in-Chief John Furrier bumped into Banerjee at HP Discover 2011, back when he still worked for the hardware vendor.  They talked about Hewlett-Packard’s culture of innovation and the many areas of interest that Banerjee pursued as a part of his work in an exclusive interview on theCube.

The executive told Furrier that he split HP Labs into eight teams and assigned them to work on 20 “high-impact research projects.” He praised then CEO Leo Apotheker’s enthusiasm about his work, and went on to discuss his most important projects.

In the area of mobility, Banerjee’s researchers focused on developing software that would enable mobile workers to leverage a single device for both work and recreation. He explained that the key to achieving this is to create two separate virtual environments: one for corporate data and apps, and one for personal use.

Under Banerjee’s leadership, HP Labs also doubled down on hybrid environments. The executive named integration between on-premise infrastructure and pubic cloud services as a major pain point for enterprise customers.

Big Data was another major focus at the time. The executive highlighted that data sets are growing at an unprecedented rate, stressed the importance of real-time insights for corporate decision makers, and talked about his unit’s activities in this area:

“Within Labs we have three projects, one on taming the information explosion, trying to extract metadata about the data, looking at unstructured data and trying to put some structure to it,” Banerjee told Furrier.  “[We also have a] project on live business intelligence, looking at data that’s coming very fast, and analyzing it at the speed of business, [and] applying it to domains like live operational intelligence, like customer intelligence. The third one is around IT informatics, looking at the large amounts of data that the IT industry creates…doing data mining on it, and helping the CIO make better decisions. This was the research agenda for Labs.”

Intelligent infrastructure, what we now call software-led infrastructure, was also at the top of Banerjee’s agenda. He revealed that HP developed nano-sensors that can be embedded in technology equipment to monitor wear and tear.

The two other areas of interest that he mentioned are networking and sustainability. HP Labs developed what he called a Net Zero Data Center, which generates as much electricity as it consumes within three to five years.

For the full interview with Banerjee from HP Discover 2011, check out the video below.