HP Discover 2012 – June 5th Morning Session

Meg Whitman – CEO HP

Meg Whitman opened the session with “make it matter” the HP tag line that is permeating the conference. She recalled her initial days at HP where she found a group of extremely talented and highly motivated employees that focused on the customer.

One of the interesting stories that Meg described was their work with the British military in Afghanistan and how HP employees are embedded with the British military to understand the field conditions and to support their products.

Meg talked about their strategy as a company:

1. Infrastructure: Hardware and Printers are the core of the HP business, and will continue to be
2. Software: HP provides software, not to be a software company but to support their clients and their infrastructure
3. Services: HP focuses on value added services that provide solutions for client

HP helps the client harness the power of hardware, software and services to build solutions

Meg talked about their strategy as a company

Meg also spent some time talking about unstructured data. One interesting fact that Meg brought up is that only about 15% of data within a company is structured. Companies need ways t make sense of the vast majority of information that is unstructured.

Jeffery Katzenburg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation

Jeffery opened up with a video from several years ago where a lion named Poncho that had a great affection for Jeffery. Jeffery was giving a presentation and he brought a real lion on stage. The lion was grabbing at him and at one point wrapped its front paws around his leg. The lion wasn’t aggressive, just overly friendly. Jeffery explained that it was the trainers that protected him during this point and he compared that to HP who provides support and protection for their infrastructure at DreamWorks.

Jeffery Katzenburg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation

He then went on to discuss the transformation of DreamWorks from an hand drawn animation company in 1994 to a digital producer of very complex 3D Digital Animation where a separate movie must be created for each eye. He went on to discuss the role technology plays in their innovation and talked about two laws…Moore’s Law and Jeffery’s Law

Moore’s Law
The processing power of technology doubles every two years

Jeffery’s Law
We will always want more than Moore

Jeffery then went on to discuss how DreamWorks, Intel and HP are working together to develop a set of tools to radically transform the way animation is done. Currently animators have to break the animation process down into individual activities. First, they model the head. Then they have to model the body, and then the fur. This process takes multiple iterations and up to 8 Hours to get all of the reviews to happen and potential changes back from review. The new innovative solution will allow them to render the entire animation real time and view it how it will be viewed in final form. Jeffery pointed out that this moves them from animating at the speed of processing to animating at the speed of their imaginations!

The session ended with the screens all rolling back to expose the HP Discover Zone…very dramatic!

Meg greeting conference attendees

Jeffery meeting the fans

The Assure team with Prashant Satoskar, Co-Founder & VP of Services, Northway Solutions