Oren Ariel

Director, HP Labs Israel, Printing Automation Lab

Oren Ariel is the director of HP Labs Israel, Printing Automation Lab, overseeing research focused on color printing algorithms, compression and coding algorithms, image and video processing algorithms, image analysis and understanding algorithms and learning technologies.

The lab, based in Haifa on the campus of Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, which was founded in 1994 by Abraham Lempel, has made key contributions to HP's Indigo presses, HP's digital cameras and scanners and to many of the company's printers.

Before assuming the director's job, Ariel was vice president and chief architect for HP Software, responsible for the architecture blueprint, product integration architecture and shared technologies supporting the Business Technology Optimization (BTO) line of products. He also managed a global team of architects as well as the worldwide shared technology development organization reporting to HP Software's vice president for research and development.

Ariel joined HP in 2006 with the acquisition of Mercury Corp., where he was the company's chief architect and vice president of R&D for its Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) division. After joining Mercury in 2000, he co-founded its software as a service (SaaS) division and was its chief technology officer. Later contributions included leading the ITSM division from inception through incubation of products and managing the entire Mercury product line architecture spanning nearly $1 billion in revenues.

Prior to Mercury, Ariel was co-founder and chief scientist of Narus Inc, a maker of mediation technology for the telecom billing industry. Earlier roles including independent consulting with several startup companies such as TradingDynamics (acquired by Ariba); chief technology officer at VDOnet, a pioneer of products that enable Internet video broadcasting and video telephony; technical lead at Unique LTD (acquired by AOL), a maker of over-the-net collaboration applications, and director of software engineering at Optibase Inc, a maker of digital compression technology.

Ariel holds a Bachelor's degree from Technion, Israel Institute of Technology where in 1990 he received an outstanding achievement award for developing an algorithm for topographic map compression.