PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Forget individually packaged software applications tailored for specific devices. The real future of computing, according to Hewlett-Packard's CTO Shane Robison, is in the cloud -- a cloud that will serve up intelligent, device agnostic services wherever you are.
At an HP Labs event held at the company's corporate headquarters on Thursday, Robison and other HP executives talked about this new generation of cloud services, speculating that they will one day anticipate your needs based on real-time information about your location, your own personal preferences, and even the time of day.
"We're now entering what I like to call the era of everything as a service," Robison said. "What we're really doing (at HP) is presenting our technologies as services or through other services."
During his talk Robison recalled the decade of rampant software development that followed once the PC was established as a true platform. He said we're at the same point today with the internet and cloud services.
In a broader sense, Thursday's event wasn't just about cloud computing, but also about the new restructuring and refocusing of HP Labs.
"We have a plan," said Prith Banerjee, director of HP Labs. "We will make 20-30 big bets on high impact research areas by putting the entire resources of HP Labs behind them."
That's a significant cutback for the world's number one PC manufacturer. Previously, there were as many as 150 separate research projects going on at any given time at HP Labs. Under the new R&D scheme, the company will now focus 1/3 of its efforts on basic exploratory research, 1/3 on proprietary research and 1/3 on advanced product research.
The fruits of some of that research were on display, too, including BRAIN (Behaviorally Robust Aggregation of Information in Networks), a web-based collective wisdom extraction tool that turns predicting the future into a game for Fortune 100 companies; FaceBubble, a photo clustering tool that uses face recognition to comb through thousands of photos and retrieve the precise picture you want; and CloudPrint, a free web-based service that lets you share, print and store documents and photos using any mobile phone.
Ultimately, HP Lab's decision to cut back on many of its superfluous projects and refocus on what it calls "high impact" research may underscore the pressing need for coming up with new ways of acquiring and analyzing the glut of information now on the web.
Indeed, taming all that data is going to be a daunting (and expensive) task if you believe Banerjee, who says that the amount of information we will create in the next five years will be more than the amount that's been created in our entire history. Therefore, finding intelligent crowd-sourcing tools, coming up with ways to access long tail content and developing additional service-oriented technologies will become paramount for PC maker.
"If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there," concluded Robison. "For us, we know where we're going and we just want to choose the right path the get there."
