Cows and data centers: What HP’s chief engineer thinks about fusing the real world with technology

VB: I wonder if there’s a difference between the people who are working at HP versus people who are working at, say, Facebook.

Patel: Could be. Or other social networking companies. I write a lot on LinkedIn about the dawn of the cyber physical age. I had the fortune to be a mechanical engineer, but also gain that breadth in software design and system architecture. One control system we built had more than 10,000 sensors, more than 600 actuators. It was implanted using .NET. So I didn’t gain coding skills, but at least architectural skills. When I have these conversations, sometimes I do hear people saying I’m from a bygone era.

One of my neighbors is a civil engineer. He likes to say that the guy who built the Golden Gate Bridge never made millions. But 50 years from now I’ll still be able to drive to Marin County. One guy told me that there’s nothing new in civil engineering, so I sent him a video of automated bridge-building in China. There are new things happening. We just don’t want to explore it. Civil engineering is just as important.

I’m looking at the idea of being able to have tactile interfaces. We’re concerned about people who run power plants who are retiring. What about the mechanics who maintain airplanes? As an IT company, as a cyber physical company, how can I look at AR and VR and haptic holography to improve productivity? One person might manage a lot of different airplanes. Will haptic interfaces help? When I look at all these cool things, I have to look at it in terms of productivity improvement, energy savings, and value to the customer. Will the customer buy it from me because they see value in it? Everything is a value-driven conversation.

My data centers were the same. I remember when I talked about energy savings in data centers. I went to a conference and someone told me, “Nobody ever got fired for wasting energy. You get fired if a server shuts down.” My reply was, “You’ll get fired for both.” If your service agreement says the server should be on, it should be on. And if you’re saying energy doesn’t matter, when I went to the customer, they’d say, “If you give me a six-month payback, I’ll buy it.” This was in 1999. Customers are always looking for value.

I think of myself as the chief engineer who’s on the bridge looking at trends and thinking about what technologies we should worry about. But I’m also in the engine room. We have a very multidisciplinary engine room, because of our breadth and our diversity of products. So how do I surface those skills? We’ve gone across the company and created a unique model. We’ve surfaced these skills in materials, micro-technologies, system-on-chip, thermal management, liability, all the way from bottom to top. These are the slices that are necessary to build value stacks.

VB: Hardware and software?

Patel: Hardware, software, firmware. There’s software, data science, knowledge discovery. We have our firmware group. I believe the cyber physical world is a hardware and software co-designed world. We can’t be over-provisioned on software and under-provisioned on hardware.

In our case we’ve identified these communities. They come together and teach each other and drive guidance. My vision going forward—let’s say a business unit leader says they need help with figuring out how to test things at high temperatures. There aren’t industry standard tests available. I should be able to mobilize the materials team, the liability team, the thermal management team, and create a special ops team on a helicopter that goes out and helps that leader. It’s on-demand provisioning of resources for whatever value we’re delivering in a vertical – robotics, security.

To go back to security, I think of security as a horizontal and as a vertical. If I have a cyber physical system, how should I think about security from bottom to top? How should I think of security horizontally in every device that I build?

Above: HP’s original garage has old oscilloscope products.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

VB: I had fun talking with Shane about science fiction and video games. They’re often very fictional, but some of the games coming have a way of simplifying to get a point across. Watch Dogs 2, from Ubisoft, comes out in November. It’s set in San Francisco and it’s all about the future when we have a smart city. Hacktivists fight back and they hack into the smart city, for a cause.

The developers were saying that the interesting thing about Silicon Valley is that a lot of technologists here in the Bay Area are thinking not about tech for tech’s sake, or tech for getting rich, but keeping technology open. I wonder how much that idea is interesting to you.

Patel: You can look at an example like the blockchain, Bitcoin, the existence of a distributed ledger and the whole motivation there, so there’s no central authority keeping track of transactions. We pay attention to that. What I ask—it’s not necessarily for digital currency alone. What does it tell us about how we should think about models evolving in the future? As these models evolve, how should we think about computing? If distributed ledger blockchains are an example of the way things are going to be done, given our core in computing and printing, what should we think about as far as how we design these things?

My philosophy, as I say, goes people, profit, planet, and petabytes of data. How do you operate at that crossroads? On the city scale, it’s the same thing. How do I do city-scale resource management? There was a time when we motivated cities and thought about city-scale architectures.

The interesting thing is, a lot of cities aren’t able to do the investments that are necessary. Many cities we talk to want to do resource management as a service. How do we help cities on a pay-per-use basis? As you think about these models, are there ways we can help cities manage without having to put out the necessary capital outlay?