HP Smart Office 2007 - Takin' Care of Business

HP Takes Care of Business

Yes indeed, HP has been making the PC personal again and following several consumer oriented product launches over the last few months, HP next focused to spruce up it's SMB (Small and Medium Businesses) offerings and is literally taking care of business. A few day back on 18th October 2007 at Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, HP announced several enhancements and new products specifically catered for the Asia Pacific region to bolster the fast growing SMB segment in this region. After all, as the world's number one PC vendor, they know all too well that complacency is out of the question if they wish to stay at the top.

At the launch event in Vietnam, HP unveiled new business desktop PCs, entry-level workstations, SMB-focused print and imaging devices, renewed business class notebooks, new business-class handheld computing devices and last but not least, to support the enhanced hardware solutions, better software services for the next level of business collaboration. In the following pages, we share with you the key highlights of the event.

HP's New Line of Affordable Business Notebooks

When the Intel Santa Rosa platform made its official debut, HP had a whole slew of notebooks tuned for general consumers and the business professionals. With that, they also ended the old HP "nx" series of business class notebooks and introduced four new suffixes to denote the different notebook segmentation of the business class notebooks:- standard (s), business (b), workstation (w) and professional (p). However to-date, HP only launched the b/w/p class of notebooks which were mostly professional business class notebooks or tuned for high-end workstation replacement class types. What was missing was a no nonsense business-centric notebook that was affordable and reliable that would appeal to small business owners. That task now befalls on the just launched s-class series.

 

The HP Compaq 6520s and the 6720s are among the first notebooks to enter this space and unlike the traditional serious black outlook of business class notebooks, the s-series have a friendlier but still professional silver-grey finish. Besides the outer cover, even the notebook's chassis has been refined for a thinner and lighter build than any of its other series. Speaking with Dan Forlenza, Vice President and General Manger, Worldwide Business Notebooks, HP, he pointed that the goal of the s-series was to increase the industrial design for effective cost points, targeted at the small businesses. Did we mention that they are also simple and straightforward to use? With only power and wireless on/off buttons, modern notebooks don't come any simpler than these US$649 workhorses with decent tech specs.

The typical SMB owner could be a 1-man team or even a 30-man team, but these small business groups often have a more relaxed setup that may not require full fledged business computing machine, but neither does one want a consumer-level notebook which may not come equipped with the correct suite of applications and services required in business environments. Worse still, consumer class notebooks are often pummeled with excessive utilities and software the average Joe. Conflicts, resource utilization, less responsive systems are some of the usual traits from such a configuration leading to counter productivity at some level. With the HP Compaq 6520s and 6720s, HP hopes to capture the growing SMB space with the right hardware options and we think they do have a valid proposition.

More New Notebooks and Comparison Charts

Moving up the ladder, the b-series sees a new entrant with the HP Compaq 2210b. A designed-in-Asia-for-Asia notebook, this 12.1-inch ultra portable notebook at less than 1.7kg aims to empower the busy Asian mobile worker with an affordable starting price of US$699 only.

* Warranty Terms and conditions are country-dependant, but further add-on options are available.

Other than physical form factor of the HP Compaq 2210b, this b-series notebook differs quite a bit from the 6520s and 6720s notebooks. Among the differences, security and productivity features are the biggest improvements on the 2210b notebook. For example, the 2210b offers a near complete suite of HP ProtectTools whereas the s-series notebooks offer only the Device Access Manager module. Here's how the different notebook segments differ in various security feature offerings:-

And those are just security features alone. Here's the productivity feature differences:-

Moving up to the p-series, HP incorporates a TPM security chip for added encryption and protection of sensitive data. Also, HP has added a 64GB solid state drive option for some of the professional notebook models such as the HP Compaq 2510p, 2710p, 6910p and the all of the 8000 series. No doubt an expensive option, it's good to see HP embrace this early to offer users more reliability with very sensitive data (since there are no moving parts like traditional HDDs), as well as speedy system booting and application loading to improve the overall user experience.

Personalized Mobile Computing Solutions

Just over a month ago, HP announced their largest range of HP iPAQs in the in the company's history with 5 new models to step up their portfolio of mobile devices � some strictly for business, while others offer more than just managing business on the go. While they are not yet available, expect to see them by the end of the year. For now, here are some of their key features and expected price points:-

Dave Rothschild, Vice President for Handheld Business Group, Personal Systems Group, HP, actually commented "the enterprise PDA market is still in demand", which is quite the opposite of the retail consumer front of the business where smartphones are picking up the pace. PDAs in the enterprise segment are growing in demand because some of the companies have sunk a lot of money to develop applications based on them and they want to continue running them even after long time frames like two years or more and further deploy them in more areas and roles. Furthermore, there are companies that deal with sensitive information and will not allow employees to have cellular phone functionality or imaging capabilities, so that's where enterprise class PDAs fill the void of managing personal and business commitments. This trend is especially apparent in Europe and some parts of USA and Asia as highlighted by Dave.

The growth prospects for HP's mobility devices as well as other vendors in this same field looks huge as Dave summarized his findings from around the globe that many users are interested in personal computing devices smaller than the laptop for management and connectivity needs but most aren't adopting them yet due to the price barriers of both the device as well as the data rate plans. Once these come down, handheld devices are going to be ubiquitous as basic mobile phones are today. HP's own stats put that out of a 650-million strong mobile computing market, only 30-million of them are handheld owners. So there's huge growth potential in time to come and this is yet another reason why HP is expanding its iPAQ offerings and to be there when the market needs them most.

The Enterprise Mobility Suite

For enterprises and SMBs to administer, manage and roll out services to mobile handheld devices of their ever demanding user group, HP is introducing their Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS). Comprising of the Enterprise Mobility Manager software running on a server and the Enterprise Mobility Agent software running on the mobile device, this suite also provides for self-care to individual end-users who seek solutions without waiting for their IT department.

The best part about the suite is that is supports non HP devices as well. As long as the handheld supports OMA-DM protocol or Windows Mobile or Symbian operating systems, the device is compatible with this service. Another highlight of the EMS is ease of use as the end-user self service is accessible via a browser based self-care portal. Some of the services available to self-care folks are device setup, settings restoration function, resolving device issues for mobile services, software/firmware updates to handhelds and last but not least, a locking and data wipe service if you've misplaced your device.

New Business PCs

Of course not forgetting the traditional workhorse machines of the office environment, HP also has several new affordable desktop and workstation systems boasting more efficient and faster hardware that have been updated with the latest system designs for the APAC region.

New Print and Imaging Devices for the SMB Arena

Three new laser printers and a high-end scanner were launched at this event specifically for the SMB market space. However, unlike the usual feature identification and repackaging for the appropriate market space, the LaserJets are the first monochrome laser printers in HP's lineup to feature chemically-grown spherical toner to notch up print quality to a whole new level. This technology for the spherical Chemically Prepared mono Toner (CPT) is derived from the ColorSphere technology that's found in HP's high-end color laser printers. Basically, unlike traditional grounded toner particles, these chemically grown toner particles with a wax core are consistent in their size and are spherically shaped. This results in the consistently crisp text and images due to better control of toner particle placement precision. Also due to the properties of the new toner element, printers based on this toner are able to use 15% less power to fuse the toner to the paper as it doesn't require as high a temperature as compared to using regular toners.

An additional benefit of the new toner properties is that HP was able to design smaller toner cartridges which resulted in overall smaller printer design as seen below in the new series of printers using the latest in toner technology. These new toners are also endowed with HP's 'smart' chip intelligence that alerts users when to purchase the next toner cartridge, as well as automatically enables Electrophotographic adjustments to ensure to consistent print quality all through the lifespan of the cartridge. The latter aspect negates the need for the common 'toner shaking' procedure that's needed periodically in traditional toner cartridges to spread the toner evenly within.

Closing Comments

For over a year now, we've seen HP tackling several of their product segments consecutively, innovating and improving their offerings to specifically cater to their respective categories. Matched with an effective and catchy campaign with simple and purposeful taglines, it looks like HP has conjured up a winning formula. Of course proper execution is equally important and they've managed it all well so far.

At the launch event in Vietnam, HP unveiled new business desktop PCs, entry-level workstations, SMB-focused print and imaging devices, renewed business class notebooks boasting consumer-class touches proving business can mesh with style, new business-class handheld computing devices and last but not least, to support the enhanced hardware, better software services for the next level of business collaboration. In today's context, vendor services and strategic alliances with other vendors to roll out a bigger service network play a bigger role than ever before in winning over new customers and winning the office contract tenders. From what HP has in store for us today, HP seems well positioned to offer customers the right hardware as well as the right suite of services to meet SMB needs.

While it seems that HP has it all covered, we wanted to look through the crystal ball and find out what other areas HP would set its eyes upon next in the coming year or two to further improve their offerings and so we talked to Adrian Koch, Senior Vice President, Personal Systems Group (HP APAC and Japan), to sum up what's next for HP. "Looking at it from the PC angle, we definitely believe in virtualization; in the enterprise space, we're the only globally operating vendor who has a PC blade or a virtual PC offering; so that's one area we're right there, technology-wise as well as solution-wise. In terms of SMB, I think it's really about going beyond the product by adding the best possible customer experience beyond the product to make sure our customers are really getting that experience and are liking it and that we guide them through the entire cycle. I would say these are two major objectives and directions we're going towards (in the near future)."

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