HP spells out plans to get more 'bang' from its R&D bucks

After announcing a reorg of its laboratories today, Hewlett-Packard met with its 600-strong R&D staff to tell them they'll be distributed across 23 different teams, with names like "Face Bubble," "Cloud Print," and "Cloud View."

At a meeting today at Hewlett-Packard's headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, HP is detailing new plans to get more bang out of its research and development bucks by reorganizing its researchers around themes such as "dynamic cloud computing."

Earlier today, HP issued an announcement calling for HP Labs to start focusing on 20 to 30 large research projects, rather than the approximately 150 smaller projects the R&D workers have dealt with in the past. But although HP CEO Mark Hurd has introduced a number of cost-cutting moves since taking the helm three years ago, layoffs won't be one of them.

"We have a commitment to the 'R' in R&D," said Hurd in remarks at the event, posted live from the meeting in Eric Savitz's blog on Barron's Online. Instead, HP simply wants to gain more commercially saleable products and services out of the labs' efforts.

HP's 600-or-so researchers will now be reorganized into 23 labs with 20 to 30 people each, explained Prith Banerjee, director of HP Labs, also at the meeting today. The new alignment of research labs will be organized around five broad themes: information explosion, dynamic cloud services, content transformation, intelligent infrastructure, and sustainability. Nine of the 23 labs will be devoted to new ways of acquiring, analyzing and delivering this "explosion" of information.

Some of the names of these new labs seem to have been pulled from out of a cloud...one that's floating 50,000 feet above the clouds from which most buzzwords are already conjured.

For instance, "Face Bubble" -- one of the areas to be addressed by the "information explosion" teams -- will focus on research into facial recognition technology based on "digitized visual content."

Also, the "dynamic cloud services" researchers will be exploring concepts such as "Cloud Print," for storing documents on the Internet and then printing them out from anywhere; and "Cloud View," for looking at stock quotes and other information without a browser on a mobile phone.

And according to Banerjee, HP will create a research review board to make sure the labs are working on the "most pressing problems" facing customers over the decade ahead.

Later today, Shane Robison, HP's chief strategy and technology officer, told the researchers he is concentrating on "Everything as a Service." It isn't enough just to be able to connect any device to the network, he said. Rather, users should be getting connected to services they value.

Users still to get a more "seamless experience" across different devices and services, remarked Robison. Moreover, "searching needs to be done for you and not by you." The ingredients he feels are needed to make all this happen include smarter devices, more intelligent networks, and "next generation data centers."