Jeffrey Katzenberg keynote at Discover: HP a cloud leader from the start

[#1]

Yesterday, I went to hear Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg talk at HP Discover Frankfurt. Now my wife would probably kong me over the head for saying this—she is the smart one in our marriage—but I remember Jeffrey for his movies at DreamWorks Animation. I did not remember his role at Disney, where he had a hand in just about every animated movie that my children loved when they were kids. One little-known fact for the movie buffs reading this post is that his favorite movie—a hard choice, he admitted—was The Lion King. He told the crowd that The Lion King was his favorite because it was an allegory for his life as a young man and he identified with Simba.

With the hard question of his favorite movie answered, Jeffrey transitioned to talking about DreamWorks. Jeffrey described piece by piece why his computing environment is as complex as Walmart’s. Think about how amazing this statement is. As part of discussing why this case, Jeffrey said that they work on 10 movies at a time. Each movie takes 5 years to produce its roughly 130,000 frames. During the year, they have peak demand periods. Jeffrey said that surges were so significant they could delay movie release dates because the variability and timing of peak demands are often not predictable.

Given the critical importance of IT to DreamWorks’ business, Jeffrey went to HP seven years ago to figure out an answer. Ever since, the two companies have collaborated on solutions that enable DreamWorks to keep pushing the boundaries of digital animation.  Jeffrey called HP the first high-performance cloud provider and remarked that HP has been leading in cloud since day one.

Solution page:  Cloud Computing

Twitter: @MylesSuer

[#2]

I find it very interesting that when Bill and Dave started HP, one of their first customer was Disney.  They bought the audio oscillator to create unique sound for the movie Fantasia.  Since HP was started back in the 1940s, it has been helping with animated movies.  That remains true today with Dreamworks.  Even at Epcot, in Spaceship Earth, the ride has the Garage where HP was started.  Lets keep up the tradition of Bill and Dave!