At a recent customer meet, HP showcased its workstation solutions.
The company had on display, several of its workstation products
with demonstrations of these systems would help address the needs
of each segment. Among this was the Z800 workstation, with which
the company aims to increase its hold on the Indian workstation
market.
Speaking about the company’s latest workstation offerings in
India, Anurag Gupta, Country Manager – Workstation, Personal
Systems Group, HP India explains that the Z800 features a desktop
virtualization solution by Parallels that can allow multiple
platforms such as Windows and Linux to run within a single
system.
He says that such a configuration can be used by customers who want
to have more than one person working on a single application and
address the issue of underutilization of assets. It can
alternatively used by customers in mixed environments such as
Windows and Linux where a single person tests these applications
for their behavior in multiple environments.
The workstation also features the company’s recently launched
SkyRoom which is based on high level video and image compression
technologies developed by the company for NASA’s Mars
Exploration mission. The solution allows users spread across
different locations and geographies to collaborate on graphic
designs and share inputs through the video conferencing.
This according to the company not only reduces the bandwidth
requirement but also ensures security. The solution is currently
limited to enterprise networks for both bandwidth and enterprise
security reasons, and requires a minimum of 512 kbps connection for
video conferencing between two users.
The use of this application is intended for organizations which
would want to collaborate on graphical designs of products that
they design and manufacture. With these designs being the
intellectual property of the respective organizations, its security
is most important. S. K. SIM, Director, and General Manager,
Professional Workstations, Personal Systems Group, Asia Pacific and
Japan, HP explains that the solution is designed to ensure the
security of these designs while in transit during the collaboration
sessions.
He says, “The 3D images and files reside on the
organization’s data center. The entire data is not
transmitted across the network each time. Only the changes made to
the files are sent across translated as pixels at the receiving
end. This not only ensures that the integrity of the file is
maintained but also, security, since someone tapping into this
connection would only find a stream of pixel data.”
Quoting IDC’s estimation, Gupta informs that HP currently
owns a 63 percent market share in the overall desktop workstation
market and looks to increase this number with these new offerings.
The workstations are pegged at for usage, by what the company
describes as Digital Content Creation (DCC) segment which includes,
animation and gaming companies, broadcasting, print and publishing
companies. However HP is also targeting other key verticals such as
BFSI, Manufacturing, Oil and Gas, Defense and Education.
From the BFSI segment’s point of view, a lot of users in
financial organizations have multiple machines and monitors for
trading and other financial transactions. As opposed to high end 3D
graphics this sector requires a similar level of computational
power for crunching numbers and statistical analyses. According to
the company a single workstation of theirs can support multiple
displays while giving the computation capabilities that the sector
demands.
The company has also been targeting the education sector by setting
up Centers of Excellence (CoE) across major educational institutes
that include a few Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and
National Institute of Design (NID) campuses. Under specific
programs with ISVs, application vendors and few customers, the
company has set up around four such CoEs for free or at a
subsidized rate which consists of a lab for up to 10 users
and students are trained for using various design
applications.
HP also has remote workstation products that it has been offering
to Indian customers since the last four years. Called blade
workstations, these workstations can act as a centralized system
with users accessing the workstations through thin clients.