News 

"The technology industry is at the beginning of fundamental shift towards software as a service," says Steve Gill, managing director of HP UK and Ireland. "Instead of installing everything on our devices we'll access it through the cloud, which will get better over time at delivering information specifically tailored towards individual users."

As part of this HP believes the market will move increasingly towards "thin clients, though not necessarily dumb clients" - desktop terminals used solely to access services and applications on remote servers.

According to HP, this sort of shift will be prompted by a proliferation of online services such as backup, data storage and applications delivered to the user on request, reducing the need for desktop processing power.

The company claims it is already seeing a strong interest for "mobile thin clients" which would provide a steady stream of tailored information directly to the users' pocket.

"It would have physical senses capable of

ADVERTISEMENT

recognising current location and serving relevant information so your wife knows where you are, or Starbucks can alert you to the latest deal when you walk by, if it knows you're a coffee lover," says Huw Robson, director of HP's pervasive computing lab at Bristol.

"The challenge is not only in creating the device, but managing that information because you don't want everybody to know where you are, or what you're looking for. It's a way off, but not as far as we think."

Service-centric

As part of this shift, HP claims it is restructuring itself to move from being "hardware-centric to software-centric and now service-centric".

"We're moving through a massive change, moving through selling printers to selling printing solutions allowing people to create personalised printing based on the information they're using. People are starting to upload images of friends, family and memories online. Two to three years ago HP would have seen that as a threat but now we've created an infrastructure around that."

HP also claims the move towards everything as a service will prove a great leveller for smaller businesses who will see "entry barriers removed as anybody can purchase any level of computing power. This could, for example, allow smaller animation firms to compete with Disney or Pixar if they had the talent."

HP admits internet infrastructure is currently not capable of supporting such as vision, however, it believes as the trend progresses so will investment from big companies to support it. Until then, don't throw away your smartphone.