The Silicon Forest has grown a new grove.
HP Inc. let members of the media poke around its new open offices in Vancouver on Tuesday while the company opened up about its initiatives.
Employees speckled the 58,000-square-foot expansion at the Columbia Tech Center, with its industrial feel accented with wood and a courtyard with, true to tech company form, a pingpong table.
“Innovation is culture,” said Chief Technology Officer Shane Wall during a presentation from one of the office’s auditoriums. “It is what we do every day to build and instill an open spirit.”
Several departments have moved to the nearly completed expansion, made necessary when HP ran out of room two years ago at its main campus across the street. Launching the next industrial revolution, as the company plans, requires some extra space — and more employees, which it still needs.
“Last month, we announced … the first production-ready printing solutions on the market,” said Steve Nigro, president of 3-D printing. “Companies already say they want to use 3-D printing for production,” and not just prototypes and designs.
Nigro, based in Vancouver, said the company is looking to move the $5 billion 3-D printing industry into the $12 trillion manufacturing economy, giving manufacturers the capabilities to produce their own parts — HP’s Multi Jet Fusion 3-D printers can already produce many of its own parts.
“The key for 3-D printing is taking it from prototyping to manufacturing,” Wall said.
Printing in voxels, or three-dimensional pixels, Nigro said, the Multi Jet printers set for release this fall can create “smarter physical parts up to 10 times faster at half the cost. The economics surprised us. If you need 55,000 gears, you’re better off printing them than making a mold.”
As the technology advances, with much of that effort coming from Vancouver’s offices, the Multi Jets will be able to add color and print circuits right into the high-grade plastics and other materials they will eventually be able to print. A color 3-D printer is planned for a release after 2017.
The company hasn’t abandoned its core two-dimensional printing business, of course, and also offered a look at a few more-traditional printers Tuesday. One was built for the heavy user of smartphones, another is battery-powered and literally mobile, and a new office printer is said to be faster than ever.
HP also recently moved into wearables, teaming up with designer watch brands and stealthily incorporating HP tech into them. It’s all part of the “blended reality” and “internet of all things” initiatives, mixing technology with daily life, that the company hopes will guide its future success.
