Interview

“India will lose out if it doesn’t add innovation to the mix”

Tony Redmond, vice president and chief technology officer, HP Services talks to Prashant L Rao about why India needs to innovate, how HP came up with its Adaptive Enterprise methodology and upcoming changes in technology that will impact our lives

* Is India just an offshore location for HP Services, or is there more to it?

We have 6,000 software services professionals in India of whom a hundred do R&D. I want Indian technologists to gain a global reputation for technology excellence by taking up initiatives in mobility, security, rich media management and environmental computing. India has made the breakthrough in establishing a beachhead in technology services with work transferred here for purely economic reasons. If India doesn’t add innovation to the mix, it will lose out if another country, say China, offers cheaper development. We have centres across the world and some of them are specialised. Many years ago Galway, Ireland was in the same situation that India faces. It was Digital’s first factory outside the United States in the 1970s and manufactured PDP11 and VAX computers. Eventually hardware manufacturing left in 1991. The challenge was to move to something different. Software engineering was the answer and today they tie together 4,000 basic IA-64 or Alpha boxes to create Linux-based supercomputers with a specialised file system. That’s the kind of thing we want to see in India.

* As a technologist, what are the areas of technology that you think will be significant in the near future?

Enterprises need automatic detection and warning systems that keep an eye on the network and discover what’s going on, make sense of that, repel attacks and heal the effects of intrusions. This kind of solution has to be heterogeneous, supporting Linux, Windows and Unix.

True mobility is another one. You need one device that does everything and stays in touch around the world. I was at Mumbai airport and though my Nokia phone worked, my BlackBerry didn’t. Something like seamless Wi-Fi at airports—that’s a challenge. The trick is going to be giving people the typing capability of the Blackberry, the phone ability of a Nokia and incredible battery life in a product that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Digital photography and rich media is the third area. We’re going to see camera phones interacting with computers and printers. The aim is to drive up image quality and deal with it in the home. Hard disks can’t take years worth of digital photographs. Sony’s got an 8 megapixel camera and professional models are pushing 13 megapixels. You will end up managing one or two terabytes of data in the home. The goal is to have the consumer enjoy working with devices. Bluetooth is getting there. Our printers support it. Nikon is putting Bluetooth in their cameras. It’s like 802.11 that got exciting as more devices got enabled. We are looking at a situation where you walk into your office and your PC and printer pick up photos from your phone. It is possible today but it’s a lot of work. This is the key to tomorrow, to get devices to work better together.

* HP has been talking about its Adaptive Enterprise model. How does this work?

It is really more of an approach that we want people to take when they design their computing architecture and system to deal with changing circumstances. The best example is the HP-Compaq merger. From day one we had to have linked networks, seamless access to Web sites, linked e-mail, a common enterprise directory and any employee anywhere had to be recognised by the system. We had to do months of planning. That’s where this came from, the approach, architecture and methodology that we deployed. This works at two levels, we have workshops where we look at how a customer’s business can work with Adaptive Enterprise. If they feel that there’s scope for improvement then we go to the second stage where we focus on a particular thing and apply our consulting methodology.