The R&D and product development landscape: HP Inc

Jul 23, 2023

By Jenny Priestley

Michael Brinkman, VP of R&D, advanced compute and solutions at HP Inc tells TVBEurope about how the pandemic accelerated the company’s development of remote collaboration software, and how it is focusing on virtual production and generative AI.

The pandemic accelerated many trends that were already in progress, such as hybrid work. With knowledge workers now working more from home and on the go, it has made HP and the industry re-examine how our core customer’s workflows have changed. It accelerated our focus on remote collaboration software, culminating in the acquisition of Teradici; augmenting HP’s in-house remote access software (HP RGS/ZCentral Remote Boost) to form HP Anyware. This acceleration will also redefine the future of workstation hardware to be more compact, flexible, and capable of using remote resources.

The pandemic has required workstation R&D shops to pivot their priorities away from the known next generation roadmap of hardware offerings to a more rounded set of hardware and software solutions that allow customers to operate the way they want to, which is in a more accessible, flexible, and remote fashion. This requires the acquisition of new skills and partnerships to deliver to these needs.

The landscape of workstations and the jobs to be done is rapidly changing and growing. Traditional workloads such as M&E, PD, and AEC are embracing AI in their workflows, but whole new workflows surrounding AI are emerging. Data Science led the charge by unleashing the value of data with powerful tools to find insights in vast arrays of data. AI is now taking insights to the next level with meaningful recommendations and near finished work products. As AI-optimized silicon comes to market, the ability to deliver AI-powered solutions will become more common, while driving down cost.

At IBC we’ll be showing our completely refreshed line of Z workstations, including the G5 range of advanced workstations featuring Intel Sapphire Rapids CPU architecture and the latest NVIDIA Ada graphics. Our flagship machine, announced earlier this year, is the HP Z8 Fury which offers up to 56 CPU cores and up to 4 high-end graphics cards, making it highly suited to the demanding workloads that we have been focused on – virtual production and generative AI.

Jenny Priestley

Jenny has worked in the media throughout her career, joining TVBEurope as editor in 2017. She has also been an entertainment reporter, interviewing everyone from Kylie Minogue to Tom Hanks; as well as spending a number of years working in radio. She continues to appear on radio every week and occasionally pops up on TV.

Tags ⋅ remote production ⋅ HP