After last month’s Hewlett Packard event in Copenhagen which saw the launch of its ePrint & Share ‘cloud’ service (post), I have been watching out for further announcements. The latest concerns a new video about an Autodesk plug-in for HP ePrint & Share (the plug-in was demonstrated at HP’s event).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya3ZzgSEQJY
It’s a polished presentation, but having now watched the video three times, even freeze-framing details and re-playing the voice-over, I still didn’t spot or hear any references to Autodesk’s Software-as-a-Service construction collaboration products, Buzzsaw and Constructware – just an early mention of the “Autodesk suite”, flashes of AutoCAD, etc – despite repeated talk of the collaboration challenges (distributed teams, version control, etc) that SaaS solutions help overcome.
This may not be surprising as both are well-established Autodesk ‘cloud’ offerings that potentially might compete with HP ePrint & Share, so – at least from a marketing point of view – perhaps HP didn’t want to cloud [sic] the issue? Or maybe HP and Autodesk are planning further joint announcements concerning development of HP interfaces with these collaboration platforms? Certainly, when the question was raised in Copenhagen, HP’s people said they envisaged third party vendors and other planroom providers being able to provide an interface accessible to mobile users of ePrint & Share and to HP printer users so that they could upload, scan and share print-ready drawings direct to the SaaS platform preferred for their project or company.
