The Hindu Business Line : HP opens experience centre in Bangalore

SHOWCASING THE PRODUCTS: Mr Pallab Talukdar (right), Director, Enterprise Marketing and Alliances, Hewlett - Packard India Sales Pvt Ltd and Mr Dinesh Sharma, Director, STSD R&D Field Engagement at Advanced Technology Center in Bangalore on Thursday. - G. R. N. Somashekar

Bangalore , May 11

Hewlett-Packard has launched an experience centre for Asia-Pacific in Bangalore.

Called the Advanced Technology Center (ATC), it will give visitors an opportunity to understand and experience products, explained Mr Dinesh Sharma, Lab Director, STSD, H-P India, here on Thursday.

"Businesses need to be wiser in building their IT infrastructure. Proof of concept is necessary before investing. This is what the ATC will enable," said Mr Pallab Talukdar, Director, Enterprise Marketing & Alliances, HP India.

In a similar strategy to competitor Sun Microsystems, the company is also taking to data centre path towards showcasing its solutions.

"Our consulting, servers and service portfolio will launch H-P as the top IT provider for data centres," said Mr Talukdar.

The ATC hosts an entire data centre with servers, storage and table libraries.

Targeted at customers, independent service vendors and channel partners all over APAC, this centre will employ 2000 engineers who also conduct `regional inspired' research and development.

ATC engineers will work with Indian partners to modify global products to suit customers here. Customised products, as well as new India-specific ones will be developed here, said Mr Sharma.

EasyStore

One such product to be released in September is EasyStore, a simple storage product for small and medium sized businesses.

Others still in concept include a rack that uses RFID (radio frequency identification) for inventory management (to track placement of servers in the data centre), a Solaris to Linux and Unix migration tool and MAYA, a virtualisation tool. Virtualisation is a software blanket that helps admins manage hardware better.

The $87.9 billion company has had over 400 patents in the last three years from Bangalore.