Exploring HP's Wide-Format Strategy

At the HP Imagine event held earlier this year, I had a chance to sit down with Daniel Martinez, Global Head and General Manager, HP Large Format, for a great conversation that spanned not only what the company had on display for the wide-format and print space at this year's event, but also the challenges and trends he is paying close attention to, with a particular emphasis on sustainability and the role it plays today - and will continue to play in the future.

We broke the interview down into a three-part series, linked below, so you'll want to make sure you check it out. This deep-dive covers a wide range of topics, and it is absolutely watching all three to get a great overview on not just what HP is planning for its technologies, but also what it sees as the future of the print industry as a whole.

Unsurprisingly, AI was also a big topic of conversation - not just at HP Imagine, but also on a broader scale. In an off-camera interview with Oscar Vidal, Global Director, Product & Strategy, Large Format Print, HP, we explored that topic a bit further. He acknowledged that AI is present in most, if not all, of the innovations HP is either rolling out now, or planning to roll out in the near future, particularly when it comes to areas like workflow or security.

"There is an inherent complexity in large-format," Vidal noted, "even for me it's complex, and although we try to remove it, it's still there. AI, we believe, is going to greatly remove that complexity." From the design process all the way through the printing and finishing, he sees AI only becoming more prevalent in the wide-format space - and he believes HP is well positioned to be a leader in that space given the sheer breadth of technologies they have access to from all the different divisions of the company.

Other places where Vidal noted AI will likely play a strong role in the future include areas such as data security, not to mention getting more useful information out of that same data at the same time. "If you think about PrintOS, we have thousands of users connected, which are sharing their data in our cloud and basically we can use all this data to tell them how to become more efficient," he said. This even includes being able to see how often a machine is down, how long some jobs take to run versus others, and automatically suggest more efficient ways of running the shop to get more out of the same equipment without needing to invest in any additional software or hardware.

So, Vidal noted, "removing complexity, that's kind of step 0. Then you go to the use cases and every use case is going to have different flavors, but the engine is going to be driving on the same technology. And we have a lot of data of all these customers, [so we are] in a very nice position to be able to drive transformation, and help customers in that journey."

To learn more about all these topics, and more, make sure to check out all three videos below"

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3