HP Labs opens new research facility in Singapore

On Wednesday, February 24, 2010, HP Labs opened doors to a new research facility in Singapore. HP Labs Singapore will focus on developing an enterprise cloud software platform, dubbed Cirious, and will contribute to research efforts already underway at HP Labs sites in Palo Alto, California and Bristol, England.

The goal of Cirious is to enable providers to take full advantage of the cloud with a set of general purpose and industry-specific capabilities. Cirious will give service providers a platform to develop, host, and manage their services from the cloud, as well as integrate them with various services from other providers.

Chris Whitney, director of HP Labs Singapore, says the new research site will play an important role in advancing not only HP Labs’ mission but also the broader business objectives of HP. “As a research organization, our goal at HP Labs is to address the most complex challenges facing our customers and society in the next decade,” says Whitney. “By collaborating with our long-standing customers in the Asia Pacific region, HP Labs Singapore will help extend HP’s global strategy of accelerating the pace of technology transfer from R&D into the hands of our customers.”

HP Labs Singapore will focus its Cirious research on two objectives: to collaborate with customers to develop a set of cloud-based applications that will be built with and on top of technologies developed by HP Labs’ Palo Alto, California and Bristol, England sites; and to research data center and application design principles to explore how future cloud computing needs will be met and determine what an ideal cloud data center would look like.

Singapore: Epicenter of HP innovation in Asia Pacific

HP Labs Singapore is HP’s third research facility in the Asia Pacific region and seventh worldwide. Considered one of the most open to international trade and investment, Singapore’s economy is also one of the region’s most competitive, making it an ideal location for research and development.

In addition, Singapore serves as a hub for many of HP’s biggest customer accounts. This allows HP Labs Singapore to extend its mission of “open innovation,” a philosophy that technology innovation is best achieved through external collaboration with customers, partners, government, and academia.

Singapore is HP’s business headquarters for the Asia Pacific region. HP received strong support from the Singapore government in launching HP Labs Singapore and has already collaborated with the Singapore government on many IT projects and research-and-development initiatives.