HP Moves to Attach Its Displays to Its Systems

When Hewlett-Packard released its latest desktop and workstation solutions Sept. 6, it did something it had never previously done.

The Palo Alto, Calif., IT company coordinated the debut with that of three new display offerings—the 30-inch HP LP3065, as well as 19-inch and 20-inch models—and although HP executives stated the effort was less deliberate than it appeared, the strategy is expected to attach more HP monitors to HP systems, especially in the workstation space, where end users have consistently paired HP with third-party displays, HP officials and customers told eWEEK.

“We’ve been making monitors for a number of years, but if you ask people to name the top 10 things HP does, I doubt monitors would come up,” said Scott Gray, worldwide product marketing manager of HP’s Displays Commercial Business Segment.

“In the desktop space, it’s almost one to one. It’s more trouble not to buy the monitor with the PC, and we have about 70 percent of the market,” he said. “In the workstation space, it’s a completely different story. They have specific application requirements and need specific metrics in the [display] product, and we haven’t been the standard. Our market share is more likely in the 50 percent range.”

Instead, customers are purchasing from Apple and Dell for large-screen formats and from NEC and Eizo for high-quality solutions, partly because HP hasn’t had a compelling display story to tell when bringing the systems to market, Grady said.

End users, perpetually in search of consolidating vendor relationships, would be more likely to attach HP monitors if the company had a supporting product at launch, several customers said.

“Most people in a purchasing position would standardize as few manufacturers as possible if they had the chance,” said Matthew Schneider, director of technology at PostWorks, in New York, a post-production video-finishing firm. “When things go wrong, you have one vendor you can point to.”

In PostWorks’ case, the benefit of having a single vendor is more than just ease of managing. The firm requires all displays to be color-calibrated to ensure uniformity in quality between phases of production.

A single manufacturer for systems and display solutions would also boost a customer’s buying power with the vendor, said Yehoram Hofman, senior designer at Toyota Racing Development, which designs the car maker’s racing vehicles.

For some, HP remains out of reach. Animation giant DreamWorks, a dedicated HP shop for workstations, will likely continue to use NEC for displays because HP’s quality has yet to match NEC’s, said Derek Chan, head of digital operations at the entertainment company. “It does about 92 percent of what we need,” he said.

A Place for Each

HP expects the LP3065 to appeal to the oil and gas industry as well as automotive and aeronautics industries, where high resolutions and large-scale images are critical to business.

In the finance vertical, HP actually expects displays, specifically the new 19-inch monitors unveiled Sept. 6, to drive adoption of its workstations on trading floors. HP is scheming to take market share from Dell, whose Opteron workstation solution is too large for the small spaces required by the industry, said Jeffrey Wood, director of product marketing for HP’s personal workstation space.

The 19-inch displays allow users to tile several units together to display multiple data streams from the workstation.

The 23-inch is expected to be attractive to the users of notebooks who find their laptop monitors exceed the size of the displays with which they dock.