I just talked about Dell's views of the future according to this article. Here is Hewlett-Packards take on the future:
Lampman, head of HP's research group, said that managing data centers is one of the company's main initiatives over the next five years. Beyond individual machines, data center management includes software, energy consumption and labor.
This is very, very canny move and could be quite a lucrative business for HP. I think data storage will one of the most important challenges to computing in the next 5 years. People are taking more pictures, making more movies, and downloading more worthless crap then ever before. Where are they going to store all of those files?
Some people will store them on the hard drives or maybe cut them to HD-DVDs. While others will move their crap to offsite storage at a data center. This will be especially important when people start downloading HD-DVD movie content. Those files will fill up even the biggest hard-drives in no time flat. So offsite is one of the only places to amass a very big library that you can take anywhere there is a next generation superfast broadband connection. The idea of all of your data available anytime, anywhere on any form of media (PC, TV, IPod etc.) is the Holy Grail of Consumer Electronics.
This is just the consumer side of the coin. The corporate side will dwarf this all-together. With Sarbanes-Oxley, companies have to hold on to more piles of useless, redundant crap then ever before. They cannot hope to have all this stuff stored cheaply and easily in-house and will have to rely on data centers to hold onto this info. The electrical power savings alone of keeping data at a data center and not at the home office will be massive for some companies. This is also great for disaster preparedness and productivity since you will be able to access all of your data at any time from anyplace in the world through that super-fast broadband connection.
Even HPs recent acquisions will tie into this idea of the need to store peoples crap:
Far beyond its history as a device maker, Lampman also said that its online photography business Snapfish.com, which HP acquired last year, is a prime example of how the company wants to expand its printing business.
"Snapfish is a real force," Lampman said describing the expectations executives have in the new unit that competes with Yahoo's Flickr and many other Web-based digital photo printing and storage services.
Yup the consumer will be able to snap the photos on a wireless enabled digital camera, upload them to an HP run data center, and then jump onto a network enabled kiosk and print out the photo using an HP printer. This idea will also allow grandparents to go to a kiosk at their local Best Buy to make prints of their grandson falling off of his bike 2000 miles away without any need for a PC, a home network connection, a memory card, or anything more then a user name and password.
They could even streamline the picture taking process to make it so as soon as you snap a picture it will immediately store the data at an HP run data center. You could even set it to print out on your network enabled home printer as soon as you hit a button on the camera from the other side of the world. You won't ever have a need for a bunch of memory cards piled up in your camera bag ready to get lost somewhere. Now that is looking ahead.
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