George Dies, Hewlett-Packard Co.'s director of strategic planning , said he cannot recall another time in his seven years with the company that it announced two acquisitions on the same day, as it did last week with the announcement of the $1.6 billion purchase of Opsware Inc. and the $214 million purchase of Neoware Inc.

Coincidence? Probably not, said Dies, who suggested that the shift toward providing clients with total solutions rather than individual hardware components has been forcing the company to look beyond its own labs for promising new technologies. "We are challenged to look outside of the company more than ever before," said Dies during a brief conversation at Stanford University's AlwaysOn Summit on Thursday.

Dies spoke to Tech Confidential after participating on a panel about the role of in-house labs in innovation. Most of the panelists, including IBM Corp. fellow Jai Menon and Doug Merritt, a member of SAP AG's executive council, argued that the notion of secretly developing a technology in-house was an outdated notion from years past.

"The flattening of the world is radically changing the notion of what a company is," Merritt said. Much of SAP's best software was developed with the input of  "customers and partners who have never seen an SAP paycheck," he said. 

"A lab like the physical labs you have in high school is so last century," Dies added. "You have to think of a lab without walls."

While we try to avoid the use of that nebulous word, "solutions," but for the sake of reporting on what the panelists said, Menon estimated that 30% of all the "solutions" IBM shipped to customers included technology made by someone other than Big Blue. Dies did not provide an official estimate during the panel, but said afterward, "I'm sure it is just as high at HP."

At the same time, Dies noted that it is often the small, newly acquired companies that are most excited to have access to HP Labs. "We don't consider a defeat at all, when we acquire a company in a business where our own labs are active," he said. —Andrea Orr

Go to July 24 story from TheDeal.com

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