Interview with Christine Hawkins, Director, HP Inc - Speaker at Global IoT Conference - April 2018 Posted on : Feb 28 - 2018

We feature speakers at Global IoT Conference - April 2 - 4  2018 - Santaclara - CA to catch up and find out what he or she is working on now and what's coming next. This week we're talking to Christine Hawkins, Director, HP Inc (Topic : How HP Megatrends Influence The Focus On IoT Research)

Interview with Christine Hawkins

1. Tell us about yourself and your background.

Problem solver, outcome focussed, mentor and traveller, I currently lead the consumer wearables incubation at HP.  I have 10 years of leading teams across many HP businesses giving me the broad skills and knowledge you need to lead an incubation.  Previous to HP I led teams in Mining, Finance and Telco in Australia.

2. What have you been working on recently?

I am the Director of Incubations - Consumer Wearables in the HP CTO office and I assist the CTO by leveraging my customer focussed background to interpret the HP Megatrends research and present to our retail and commercial customers.

3. Tell me about the right tool you used recently to solve customer problem?

Leadership – during incubations we face many customer problems across diverse parts of our business. I apply my leadership skills to bring together the experts solve the problem and prevent it re-occurring.

4. Where are we now today in terms of the state of IoT, and where do you think we’ll go over the next five years?

I believe we are just at the beginning of IoT’s peak.  Although people are aware of IoT and using it in products, the ongoing management of IoT devices is still labor intensive and has a long tail after release in the market.  As tools improve for ongoing management of IoT devices the real opportunities will arise.

5. You’ve already hired 50+ people approximately. What would be your pitch to folks out there to join your Organization? Why does your organization matter in the world?

HP Inc has been reborn after the separation from HPE.  Building innovative devices for consumer and commercial customers and able to invest in research to use IoT to optimize these devices and further expand their features.  HP has a number of research teams working on IoT for a number of products, so coming to work at HP Inc is not a single boring job, but opens the opportunity to move teams and products and work on the next upcoming things.

6. What are some of the best take-aways that the attendees can have from your talk ?

We’ll share examples of how the four major socio-economic, demographic and technological trends - Rapid Urbanization, Changing Demographics, Hyper Globalization, and Accelerated Innovation will drive the need for IoT in our future and what HP is doing about these trends.

7. What are the top 2 IoT Use cases in enterprises?

Turning current “dumb” products into “smart” products to enable more understanding of your customers AND security opportunities.

8. Which company do you think is winning the IoT race?

Amazon and Google. Echo and Google Home will be the only two products remaining in the race for the voice activated connected device and the Echo is ahead at the moment.  Just like all apps need to work on Android and iOS operating systems, in the future all iOT devices will need to interface with Echo and Google Home (not just consumer devices – won’t we want to check our work calendar from home as well?).  Amazon and Google will control and therefore set the protocols for IoT devices.