Above: Juan Diego Pareja of HP Inc demonstrates a Xeon powered mobile workstation. All photos by Mark Lyndersay. Click on an image to enlarge.
On Tuesday, HP Inc introduced a new line of hardware focused on business customers in an Experience Tour event at the Trinidad Hilton.
The company, which now represents hardware sales and services for HP, is the result of a November 2015 split which hived off the company’s enterprise services as a separate division.
As one might expect from a company that’s built much of its business on supplying corporate clients with reliable, cost-effective hardware, much of the 2018 tour targeted business buyers, though the company also fields a line of consumer grade systems.
HP Inc seems to have identified Point of Sale (POS) systems, colour copiers and printers and fast laptop computers and low profile desktops as a great place to start with in the Trinidad and Tobago market.
Juan Diego Pareja, HP Category Manager, demonstrated a line of fast business computers delivering workstation class power. At their very pinnacle was a sleek silver laptop device, probably one of the company’s new ZBooks running mobile Xeon processors, which handily tripled the standard processor and motherboard performance of its regular business line.
The company is even willing to do custom configurations on these business systems in lots of 50 and up, so it’s possible to design a standard computing platform for a business with above average computing needs.
According to Pareja, the company is in third place as a supplier of POS systems and is busy working on new flat panel designs that it hopes will push them into first place.
The systems run a standard installation of Windows & or higher and offers enough ports to create custom hardware configurations that can be extended with peripherals that may lie outside of HP’s range of devices.
Base POS systems are competitively priced at between US$400 and $2,000.
Patrick Taylor
HP made its name with popular, robust and competitively priced printers, so it’s no surprise to see interesting new printers designed for SME businesses in the front lines of the company’s refreshed beachhead on these islands.
The new PageWide Pro line of multi-function printers marries the big box capabilities of a standard office printer system with the energy cost effectiveness of inkjet technologies.
These new devices consume up to 84 percent less energy than their laser powered counterparts but include all the features an office would find valuable in a shared printing device.
On the ample LCD panels, IT managers can monitor device use through passcodes and the new printers include HP SureStart technology on enterprise models, which check the onboard systems from the BIOS up and include technology which enable the devices to do a full system restore if corruption or hacking is detected.
The company demonstrated the capabilities of the PageWide Pro 777z, which prints up to 11 x 17 and its only slightly smaller sibling, the 477dw which handles standard printer paper sizes.
High capacity inkjet cartridges are available for both models, and according to Patrick Taylor, Configuration Manager for Latin America and the Caribbean, the printers can deliver 2000 letter size pages in black with 5 percent coverage, 1,600 in colour and can print at up to 75 pages per minute.
Prices are set at under US$500 for the smaller model and just over $1,900 for the larger multi-function printer.
Everything on show at the Experience Tour is currently available through channel partners and corporate bulk buyers can contact HP Inc in Miami to order direct.
