Customer Intimacy & the HP Z800

Jeff Wood, VP of Global Marketing, Commercial Solutions Unit for HP, describes the demands that film and video pros place on their workstations, how HP is meeting those demands, and how they will continue to listen to you to deliver reliable and powerful solutions.

We met with many customers across a myriad of market segments to design the newest generation of HP workstations, but the most feedback we got was from professionals in media and entertainment. As a result, we built the Z800, our flagship workstation, to be the be-all, end-all solution for film and video production.

For the past 30 years, we have tried to stay on the forefront of the workstation industry by developing an intimacy with customers like you. We have spent time meeting with studios and broadcast organizations as well as owner-operated shops, listening and gaining knowledge about what you want to do and where you want to be over the next five years. We want to make sure that you stay successful through product transitions and OS transitions, so that you maintain the identity that you have built as you deliver your film and video projects to market.

You have told us that you don't want to worry about the tools and whether they're going to limit your ability to grow. Our goal is to support you, and stay out of your way.


OUR PARTNERS ARE YOUR PARTNERS
We at HP are not going to solve every problem from top to bottom. We rely on close relationships with partners: companies like Adobe and Avid, AJA, Blackmagic, NVIDIA and many others. We know that these companies are the leaders in their fields, and we want to have the best platform in the industry to support them.

To make sure that our integration is tested and reliable, we are working with these partners two years prior to a new product coming out, to understand IO bandwidth, graphics throughput, and software compatibility. We are staying very mindful of the whole ecosystem required to bring a full solution to market for you, tested and reliable from the first day it reaches you.



The inside of the HP Z800, with higher Performance, it is designed with specific input from film and video pros. Larger view available.


PERFORMANCE
A good example of partner relationships is working alongside NVIDIA and Adobe to create an optimized solution for every aspect of video editing from scrubbing the timeline to transcoding for final delivery. These are cases where you need a lot of CPU horsepower, and also maximum GPU processing power. They blend to create the kind of performance that you can only get from the highest-end graphics cards, which Apple does not support.

NVIDIA's new Mercury Engine, brought to market with Adobe, is several orders of magnitudes faster. We know that you are always working under deadlines, so as we maximize playback and rendering performance, we know that it will give you more time to iterate designs to make sure your final production is of the highest quality.


DREAMCOLOR
We recognized early on that using calibrated CRT displays for film and video post, for broadcast studios and live productions, was necessary for you to see on your screens exactly what your viewers would see on theirs.

When CRTs went away, we got involved with studios to understand what was critical from CRTs that was missing in those early LCD panel displays. We created the DreamColor display based on that feedback from studios and creative professionals to provide a solution with billions of colors, rich color accuracy, and able to hold calibration in studio or on-location environments. And we were the only ones in the world who could bring that to you for considerably less than $30,000 a pop.



HP DreamColor LP2480zx Professional Monitor


Even after two years of production, DreamColor is the best solution for broadcast studios, location filmmaking, and post that's in the industry today, for under $2000 -- and it was because of intimacy with the customers who told us what they needed from a display, and our technological know-how to solve the problem on their behalf.


CUSTOMER INTIMACY & THE HP Z800
One of the first things we heard is that a workstation for media production professionals has to look good. We wanted to break the "HP is drab and putty-colored" mold, so the HP Z800 was co-designed by BMW Design Works to be visually compelling, both inside and out.

You also told us that you want the workstation to be easy to modify and expand. There is no workstation with more options for customization -- with capacity for bigger drives, more RAM, more card slots, and support for higher-end graphics cards -- and the Z800 makes it easier than anyone else to take advantage of them. Once inside the Z800, you can do what you need to, without any tools. A hard drive, graphics card, RAM, even the power supply. And unlike Apple, where you have to send your Mac Pro back to them for repairs, HP will get you a new power supply or motherboard or any other part you need in 24 hours. You can plug it in, and be up and running.

It even comes down to integrated handles on the top of the chassis. They're not just there for decoration. We know that you need workstations on set, and need to move them around the studio as your needs change. At Weta Digital in New Zealand, they told us they're carrying systems up and down the stairs several times as a production evolves, and they said, "We love your handles!"

So to HP, these aren't just industrial design or ergonomics issues. These are two small examples of how we incorporate specific input we've gotten from film and video pros like you.

Better performance, better third-party partnerships, more expandable, reliable, easily-serviced, beautiful and practical. We have built the HP Z800, and our place in this market, through customer intimacy: spending time where you work, listening to what you need, and supporting your plans for the future. Our continued success depends on yours.

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