As the IT industry changes to keep pace with convergence and the rise of emerging markets, vendors like Hewlett-Packard Co. have to stay one step ahead of the curve to remain competitive. At HP, the job of directing that effort falls to Shane Robison, the company's executive vice president and chief strategy and technology officer, who is responsible for overseeing the company's annual US$3.5 billion research and development (R&D) budget.

Robison caught up by telephone with IDG News Service during a recent stopover in Hong Kong to discuss how different trends, such as convergence and the rising importance of China and India, have affected HP's R&D strategy. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.

IDG News Service: How has the convergence between telecommunications and computing applications in recent years affected HP's R&D strategy?

Shane Robison: We've been involved in convergence for quite a while. If you look at the work we do with our opencall platform and managing calls, managing SMS infrastructure, and then as we bring that together with a lot of the new handheld devices that have the most sophisticated integrated communication capabilities, this is something that has been driving a lot of our R&D for some time. All of our platforms are IPv6 capable, everything from the handhelds and PCs to the servers. It's an exciting opportunity. It's an exploding growth area and we're right in the middle of it and have been for some time.

IDGNS: Discussions about convergence usually seem to be framed with the consumer or end user in mind. How has enterprise technology evolved to support these applications?

Robison: People tend to think of convergence from the perspective of the devices that they touch and feel. That's the point of reference that most people have. What they don't think about is all of the infrastructure on the back end that's supporting this experience that they're having using this device. There's a lot of sophisticated server technology, massive storage technology that's required to serve up a lot of these interactive services. You've got to have good interconnection capabilities, whether its wired or wireless. This is really a systems problem and not a device problem -- or opportunity.

It changes the way you think about it when you get into the implementation of these next-generation services. One of the things that we've been doing for the last couple of years is an end-to-end digital production pipeline called the Digital Media Platform, which we've worked on with the content providers -- the various studios like Warner Bros., DreamWorks, Disney and Sony Pictures, they're all using these types of platforms for everything from ingestion to providing digital vault capabilities which allow people to do everything from film and media restoration to digital rights management to sizing and resizing, so that you can make content available on a wide variety of devices.

All of that is automation on the back end that the user doesn't see. They would know if it wasn't there, but hopefully they don't know it's there.

IDGNS: With contract manufacturers

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