JAAP SUERMONDT, director of HP's Business Optimization laboratory, remembers the old ways.

"The idea was you'd invent, invent, invent - then drive to another unit and try to convince people to develop your idea into a product," he says.

He explains HP's new approach by pointing to their collaboration with Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks studio in developing technology for rendering computer-generated scenes for Shrek films (pictured left).

"Why would DreamWorks trust a billion-dollar concept [the Shrek franchise] to a bunch of eggheads?" he asks.

Mainly because of a close collaborative relationship that has paid off for both parties. "They supplied rendering as an experimental service. What we learned was not just how to do the fast rendering but how do you protect a billion-dollar asset. It accelerated the research, and provided our customer with a service."

The focus of the business optimisation lab, he says, is to bring analytical technologies to products and services for inidividuals and for businesses.

"HP has had a strength in supplying both the technology infrastructure and the software that runs on the infrastructure. The question now is how we better acquire, develop and deliver information."

A particular focus of the lab and of Suermondt himself is data mining.

The area has gone from an academic exercise to squeeze performance out of algorithms - because so little data was actually generated that could be mined - to a point where there's almost too much data.

"So its all about scale, figuring out what's signal, what's noise. Every business is going from how decisions used to be made, basically people shooting from the hip, to looking at all the data and bringing it in and analysing it."