Summary

HP Industrial Print modernized its data platform by moving from a siloed, rigid architecture to the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, enabling faster onboarding, improved governance, and seamless data sharing with customers who produced data through app interactions. This transformation boosted pipeline performance by 40%, and unlocked new revenue opportunities through scalable data products and monetization.

HP’s Industrial Print Software Solutions (IPSS) Business Unit has always stood at the intersection of cutting-edge hardware and software. Their portfolio provides sophisticated software and analytical products, offering digital presses workflow, monitoring and analytics. But as demand for high-speed, flexible, and automated printing grew, so did the need for a more intelligent and scalable data platform. Though robust, HP’s legacy data infrastructure limited its ability to move fast, collaborate broadly, and fully capitalize on its data. That’s why HP turned to Databricks.

The Role of Data in HP Industrial Print

To understand the importance of this transformation, it’s worth looking at how data flows within HP Industrial Print. When customers place print orders, everything from custom packaging to wide-format graphics, HP routes these requests through its proprietary application, PrintOS Site Flow. This system connects the customer with one of HP’s global network of Print Service Providers (PSPs), who fulfill the order. As the job progresses from onboarding to printing, packaging, and shipping, the PSPs scan barcodes and update statuses, creating a rich stream of operational data. This data includes orders, provider assignments, material specs, and timestamps.

From this foundation, HP extracts insights to drive business decisions. Dashboards help PSPs manage workloads and performance. Internal analytics teams use the data to monitor customer engagement, optimize supply chains, and ensure billing accuracy. HP also empowers its partners by exposing this data so PSPs can run their own comprehensive analytics.

In short, data is both an operational backbone and a strategic asset for HP Industrial Print. But the systems powering it weren’t keeping up.

The Challenges of the Legacy Architecture

In the previous setup, data flowed from MongoDB through a Kubernetes-based pipeline running on Amazon EKS. Transformed datasets landed in Amazon Redshift for internal analysis and in Amazon RDS to serve external applications. While functional, the architecture came with trade-offs.

Sharing data across HP business units was complicated and time-consuming, often requiring custom pipelines or manual data exports. The lack of a medallion architecture meant it was challenging to trace data lineage or reprocess historical data when logic or business rules changed. Governance was handled in silos, leading to inconsistent access policies.

Perhaps most critically, this architecture stifled innovation. HP had ideas for new data products—services combining internal and external data to deliver deeper insights or generate revenue—but lacked the agility and visibility to implement them.

A Modern Lakehouse Approach with Databricks SQL

HP’s new architecture, built on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, changed the equation entirely. Data is still ingested from MongoDB, but now it lands in a bronze layer in Amazon S3. From there, Databricks jobs transform the data through silver and gold layers, applying quality checks and business logic in an environment optimized for performance and scalability.

With Unity Catalog, HP can now organize data by business purpose and readiness, implementing fine-grained access control while maintaining full lineage and auditability. Teams can see not just where data lives, but how it flows—what transformations were applied, who accessed it, and what products depend on it.

This foundation unlocked rapid gains in agility and performance. Internal teams now use Databricks SQL warehouses to power dashboards, run ad hoc analysis, and even generate queries using the AI-powered Databricks Assistant. Dashboards that once lagged under load now perform consistently, even during peak data ingestion times.

Equally transformative has been the impact on data sharing. Instead of relying on RDS replication, HP now uses Delta Sharing to share live datasets with external PSPs securely. Partners are no longer tied to a specific tool or database. They can connect any Delta Sharing-compatible BI tool, including Apache Superset, to access fresh data with zero replication. This not only simplified the architecture but also significantly lowered operational expenses.

Most excitingly, Delta Sharing and system tables have enabled HP to track usage patterns by partner and dataset. By establishing this essential visibility, we are now positioned to execute the consumption-based pricing strategy that HP Industrial Print is set to pursue. This framework will allow us to tailor services based on actual usage and scalably and sustainably monetize high-value data products.

Business Impact: Speed and Opportunity

The shift to Databricks improved the technical architecture, changing how HP does business. By removing redundant systems and simplifying data sharing, this enables HP IPSS data platform to remove data silos and enable data tiering (Hot/Warm/Cold). Pipeline performance improved by 40%, and unlike before, it remained stable even when data volumes surged. On top of that, the modern data platform now powers Industrial Print’s AI workloads.

Customer onboarding, which once took days due to manual configuration and database provisioning, now takes less than five hours. This enables HP to bring new Print Service Providers online faster and with less friction.

But beyond these measurable improvements, the most significant change has been cultural. With Databricks, data is no longer locked in silos or hidden behind infrastructure barriers. It’s accessible, governable, and actionable. HP’s business and technical teams can collaborate more freely, experiment more quickly, and build more intelligently—whether that means creating new dashboards, testing a pricing model, or combining data from multiple business units to uncover new insights.

Looking Ahead

Modernizing its data platform was more than an infrastructure project for HP. It was a strategic evolution. With Databricks, HP Industrial Print has streamlined operations and cut costs on data silos and unlocked entirely new business models by introducing more data products and monetization.

In an industry where speed, precision, and flexibility define success, HP now has a data platform that matches its vision. From better decisions to better customer experiences and even new revenue sources, Databricks is helping HP Industrial Print Software Solutions turn its data into a competitive advantage.

Want to see how Databricks can help you simplify your data architecture, cut costs on data silos, and unlock new business opportunities? Get started today with Databricks SQL.