HP today opened the doors to its advanced research facility in Singapore, the latest addition to the company’s global collaborative research centers, developed to address the most complex challenges facing its customers and society in the next decade.

HP Labs Singapore will serve as a hub for open innovation in the Asia Pacific region and represents another investment the company is making to drive its Everything as a Service vision.

“Our new lab in Singapore is a key component of the transformation strategy put in motion less than three years ago to accelerate our pace of technology transfer and bring a variety of advancements to market,” said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president, Research, and director, HP Labs. “HP Labs Singapore aligns very closely with HP’s strategic growth areas and significantly expands the resources we bring to bear on our customers’ biggest opportunities and challenges.”

HP Labs Singapore will embark on a range of ambitious projects that fundamentally re-examine data center and application design principles to explore how future cloud computing needs will be met.

The lab will support a number of key cloud initiatives already underway at other HP Labs sites, including collaborating closely with the Service Automation and Integration Lab (SAIL) based in Palo Alto, Calif., and the Automated Infrastructure Lab (AIL) based in Bristol, England. Together, these three labs will work on Cirious, HP’s vision for creating an enterprise cloud software platform.

Through a combination of applied and exploratory research, the lab will work closely with customers, partners, HP business divisions and academia to generate advancements that will drive research for Cirious. As the IT industry moves toward a service-based infrastructure model, HP expects its customers to capitalize on this shift using the developments from HP Labs Singapore.

The Singapore Government has been a key partner in the development of this new research facility. HP’s expanded investment in the city-state, which already serves as the company’s regional headquarters, is the result of a rapidly growing regional customer base and Singapore’s business-friendly attributes, including easy access to global talent, a collaborative culture and an unparalleled network infrastructure.

“We are very pleased that HP is expanding its full value chain of activities in Singapore to include upstream research with the setting up of HP Labs,” said Lim Hng Kiang, Singapore’s Minister for Trade and Industry. “HP Labs Singapore is a strong endorsement of Singapore’s ability to host innovation and knowledge-intensive activities. HP’s expansion also attests to the growing role of Singapore as a Global Asia Hub where multinational corporations, global midsized companies and Asian firms innovate, manage and integrate their Asian and global business.”

The new lab is the latest of many recent investments HP has made in Singapore. HP’s Enterprise Business unit and HP Labs have already launched a number of important data center related initiatives in Singapore to help businesses address current and future cloud computing needs. For example:

• As part of the Open Cirrus project, HP has partnered with Intel, Yahoo! and the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore to create a global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. IDA houses one of nine test bed locations worldwide.
• HP has partnered with SingTel to form Singapore’s largest commercial grid services platform called Alatum, under IDA’s Grid Service Provisioning project. Alatum offers a variety of computing power, storage and software applications on a pay-per-use, on-demand and online basis. It currently has 15 independent software vendor partners and more than 70 customers.

HP Labs Singapore is the company’s third research facility in the Asia Pacific region and its seventh worldwide. The facility is located in Fusionopolis, an industrial complex that houses public and private research institutes that share state-of-the-art IT and communications facilities and test beds.

Additional information about HP Labs Singapore is available at www.hpl.hp.com/research/hpl_singapore_cloud_software.

Watch HP’s Chris Whitney discuss the new lab’s research agenda at www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i7xsjvVSIY.

Follow HP Labs on Twitter at www.twitter.com/HPLabs.

Follow HP News on Twitter at www.twitter.com/HPNews.