In the past year HP has been seeing some major changes in its operations. It is now on its third CEO in this period and also during this time it has seen its share price plummet as the company fails to reach its financial targets and the financial community appears to be losing confidence in the company to deliver them. There have been planned changes announced the most significant being the plan from the previous CEO Leo Apotheker to sell off the PC operations, known as Personal Systems Group. Meg Whitman, the new CEO has yet to indicate if this is still HP’s policy but she has indicated that the company will concentrate more on software and away from hardware. The first indication of this has been the acquisition of Autonomy, Europe’s second largest software company for around $10 billion. There have also been rumors that the IPG printing division may also be offloaded as HP switches to move further into being a software and services company with an emphasis on Cloud based operations.

I therefore welcomed the opportunity to attend a major HP Market Influencer event for more than 50 European analysts, press and bloggers and more than 200 channel distribution partners, that was held in Dublin, Ireland, last week organized by the IPG division. My attendance was especially to hear Vyomesh Joshi, (VJ), the Executive VP of the HP Imaging and Printing Group. It is always worth listening to VJ for his vision and enthusiasm, but in the current changing situation at HP it was particularly worthwhile.

The message at the event was "Reach for the Cloud" as it outlined the HP IPG developments for implementing Cloud based printing and publishing. I felt however that VJ should perhaps have used as theme music for his talk the Rolling Stones 1967 hit, "Get Off of My Cloud" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgWUi-ozMAU) to show HP's Board that IPG was building a dominating approach for the rapidly growing services operations for printing and publishing. His presentation showed how IPG was building a major range of service operations and planned to lead the world in Cloud based printing and publishing operations as well as maintaining the rapid growth of HP's digital printing business. Other HP businesses are developing their own Cloud operations and Autonomy already has a major area of its business operating in the Cloud.

VJ’s presentation was an outline of the IPG strategy for the next ten years. He first looked back at the previous ten years, that is the duration of his time running the IPG division. In 2001 IPG’s revenues were $19.1 billion whereas the revenue for 2011 should be in the region of $26 billion. Profits have doubled over this period. Today most of this growth is coming from outside of the USA and Europe. He indicated that African business was growing at double the European rate of growth.

The ongoing growth of the HP IPG business will come from utilizing the power of the Internet to build new business operations operating in the Cloud. The HP printing and scanning devices will become the on and off ramps for this business. Today all new HP printers costing more than $79 are web connected, and by the end of 2011 there will be more than 20 million web connected HP devices installed, and VJ anticipated that the installed base would be 50 million by the end of 2012. All of these devices have specific email addresses so one can send items to be printed via the Internet, subject to the recipient indicating they are happy to receive them and that the sender is allowed to send to the recipient. These devices will create a multi-function media channel. The HP Cloud based ePrint Center will be an Apps repository and will run HP’s Scheduled Delivery Service. Customers can sign up for specific items when they need them.

Various examples were given of how such services could operate. HP has partnerships in Europe with Deutsche Post and La Poste in France where users will be able to purchase and print out postal items like stamps.  In Holland the Ronald McDonald Huis, a hospital for children has messages and pictures (eSmiles) being sent to children to generate money for the charity. Another application was seen from Spanish architects GMBT. They are using HP’s large format printers and scanners to work via the Cloud for sending and updating plans and drawings to construction sites and offices around the world. One also saw the potential of consumers ordering custom wallpaper using Cloud services and for this wallpaper to then be printed out using HP’s Latex ink large format printers.

Most of the applications outlined above are using home, office and wide format display printers. IPG however operates as one of the largest suppliers into the graphic arts markets. In this it offers presses from HP Indigo, DesignJet color proofers, high-speed continuous feed ink jet presses, and all the associated workflow and servers to operate these devices. HP’s IPG division will in addition offer a range of Cloud based services for printing and publishing applications that will support all these devices. That is not to say that a huge HP T400 web press will be connected by email to the Cloud, but it’s support operations will allow working via the Cloud.

To show the extent of HP’s position in graphic arts and its importance in the market, the following figures showing HP’s market were given at the Dublin event. Today there are more than 5,000 HP Indigo presses in 120 countries. Thirteen countries have an installed base of more than 100 HP Indigo presses. The growth in pages from HP Indigo presses is continuing. The cumulative growth in the period from Jan 2009 has been as follows. Labels and packaging 36%; general commercial printing 88%; publishing 28%; transpromo 47%; photo 23%; and direct marketing 21%. In total it is predicted that 16 billion pages will be printed on HP Indigo presses in 2011.

There are now 42 HP-T Series continuous feed inkjet presses in operation around the world with two customers having five presses and two others with three presses. In 2011 these presses will print more than 5 billion pages, and with the level of growth that is being seen with them the overall volume of print will increase very rapidly to overtake the total number of prints from HP Indigo presses.

In conclusion the Dublin event showed the current strength of HP’s IPG division, but above all it showed that HP plans to increase its leading position as all markets move to switch operations to work in the Cloud. Obviously the Cloud is very important for all HP’s operations, whether or not HP decide to sell off their Personal Systems Group operations. Vyomesh Joshi was I feel was using this event not only to introduce the new ten-year vision of IPG to his distribution partners and market influencers, but also to remind the HP Board and its new CEO that the IPG operation was of vital importance to HP, and it should be left alone to develop and maintain its own Cloud, irrespective of what other HP Cloud’s are operating.