Las Vegas – Stephen DeWitt, the senior vice-president and general manager of HP’s (NYSE: HPQ) Personal Systems Group, told channel partners at the Americas Partner Conference that he was going to provoke and inspire. Well, his statement that “Moore’s Law is dead” certainly did a lot of provoking.
In case you were wondering: Moore’s Law says that integrated circuits will double more or less every two years. This trend by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore has held true for more than 50 years.
According to DeWitt, who earlier in his career was the GM of Symantec Canada, four billion people will be online in five years and the opportunity for global apps and infrastructure is massive and will dwarfs the numbers of today. “There will be 31 billion connected devices tethered to the net. We talk about 60 million PCs and 60 million printers sold be HP channel partners this will dwarf the volume we do,” DeWitt said.
He continued to say during his keynote address that there will also be 450 billion online interactions and ecommerce transactions every single day. “The opportunity is here to touch the world and every age demographic and its incredible compared to the 25 million apps currently based in the cloud.”DeWitt also said that sensor networks will proliferate beyond anyone’s imagination. The best known sensor network today is the GPS based car that can inform insurance companies how far and well a person drives. But in the future these same cars can enable a drive to position the car in between the lanes.
If the Moore’s Law is dead statement did not provoke the channel audience then his next statement did. DeWitt said this current tech refresh will be the last one ever. He says that enterprises and SMBs will want to take core set of apps and deliver it in a unique fashion that eliminates all cost of ownership.
“The role of PSG is never greater and we are at the end point of this vision and we’ll be the enabler of the next human experience,” he added.HP’s announcement of the Open Cloud Marketplace will be vital to this next human experience. “What this means is not a consumer apps store but how business apps will be brought to the cloud and multiple clouds. The opportunity for open cloud expands at rate truly imaginable. This is a massive growth engine and we need you (channel partners) to tell us how to invest in you,” he said.
As for the future of HP technology DeWitt said to expect touch to share devices soon. These devices will be able to recognize that they are near each other and be able to share data seamlessly and securely.
He also unveiled the HP VantagePoint large format touch display. The VantagePoint is a nine screen integrated display that is currently being pilot tested at the San Francisco 49ers and at Dreamworks SKG. “You will see this solution as a highly immersive platform for the video industry. You will be able to build a business around this,” DeWitt told the channel partners. VantagePoint will be made available in April or May.
DeWitt said that at HP the company established its products to go to market separately as commercial or consumer.
“We are moving out of that era and to a platform defined by you and designed by you in your state. This is a massive social impact (will challenge) our ability to look at an individual and say I will design around you. Computing is personal again!”
He assured the audience that HP is aware of Apple’s growth and that it does not want to be an also-ran. “We are not investing to get to sixth place or third place.”He advised the channel to build practices around core vertical markets such as healthcare, education, financial services and digital retail.
