HP Using Its Analytics Software to Grow Sales

Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO Meg Whitman has ordered a revamp of the company’s strategy, and its technology chief, John Hinshaw, is spearheading a series of moves intended to support this transformation. As the CIO Journal reported Friday, H-P is also moving much of its IT infrastructure, as well as support for its business processes, to cloud-based services. Mr. Hinshaw, executive vice president of technology and operations, also told CIO Journal his work includes using the company’s predictive analytics applications to improve sales of its computing products, including servers, laptops and printers.
For the last six months, H-P has used its Vertica database management product to analyze every Web page click on HP.com. The application provides hundreds of metrics about products users are researching, including how much time they spend looking at products. Recently, the software noted spikes in traffic on Web pages for H-P’s new Envy laptops. Vertica sent this information to H-P’s supply chain, which cranked up production of those computers. H-P also uses click-through data to improve the way it displays product information. As a result of these changes, H-P has seen product sales spike – both online and offline — for some products, said Mr. Hinshaw, who declined to provide sales growth percentages. “It’s given us great information about what people are doing on the Web,” he said.
H-P is also using its Autonomy analytics software. At the end of each quarter, workers in H-P’s global business services unit use Autonomy to manually process certain large orders that cannot be processed manually. Using criteria such as margin and unit size, Autonomy alerts the processing team about orders of highest value. “We make sure those get in first, which improves customer satisfaction,” Mr. Hinshaw tells CIO Journal. He hopes these kinds of improvements will also find their way to the bottom line, which is right where Ms. Whitman expects them.
With these efforts, H-P joins other companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, Gilt Groupe and GameStop, in parsing large amounts of data for insight into their businesses. IDC said Tuesday Big Data technology and services will grow at a 31.7% compound annual growth rate, reaching $23.8 billion in 2016.


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