14 April 2008
by Simon Quicke
The concept of pushing services to customers on a hosted basis through the cloud has been around for the past year or so.
But the majority of vendors that have developed their strategies around the hosted model have been in the software space. Now the hardware vendors are putting together their plans, with the latest offering coming from Hewlett-Packard.
Stephen Gill, managing director for UK and Ireland at Hewlett-Packard, described its approach as "everything as a service" but accepted that it was early days and that a lot of work had to be done on the infrastructure.
"Everything will be delivered to the individual from the cloud. Instead of accessing information on our devices there will be acess to the cloud through web browsers," he said.
He added that data would be more tailored to the individual and it would help support a more services-centric approach.
Backing up Gill were a number of HP executives, who agreed the impact on devices and peripherals would also be felt by hardware specialists.
"It is not going to be about a reduction in the number of devices but more of an increase as people want to be able to get their information in numerous locations," said David Wright, vice-president and general manager, Personal Systems Group, UK and Ireland at HP.
"There has to be innovation around the box and in the transformation of the industry we can play a strong part in it," he added.
Neil Sawyer, enterprise marketing manager at HP Imaging and Printing Group, said it was already developing applications that took advantage of Web 2.0 using printers to help develop personalised content.
Dale Vile, research director at Freeform Dynamics, said that to a lot of customers the message about hosted services was fresh because it had yet to be presented to them.
"As soon as you drop below the corporate space there is very little activity," he said.
