HP's Shane Wall Retires As CTO, Interim CTO Named

Wall, whose focus areas have included developing a vision for 3-D printing, will remain as a special adviser through the end of the year.

HP Inc. disclosed that Chief Technology Officer Shane Wall has retired from the role after a career that included a total of 15 years at the company.

The CTO position under Wall has been focused on setting the technology vision for the PC and printer giant, and Wall has also held the position of global head of HP Labs, the company's research wing.

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Wall will stay on as an employee of HP through the end of 2020 in a "special advisory role," HP said in a statement provided to CRN. "We are grateful to Shane for his many contributions to our business," HP said.

Glen Hopkins, who holds the role of chief print technologist at HP, has been named interim CTO, the company said. Hopkins, a 30-year veteran of HP, will remain in the interim CTO role until the company announces a permanent CTO, HP said.

Wall had been CTO of HP Inc. since Hewlett-Packard split into HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise in 2015. Before that, he’d served as CTO of printing and personal systems within HP starting in 2012.

"Shane has been a visionary in the industry for a long time and he will definitely be missed," said Larry Fulop, vice president of Tempe, Ariz.-based MicroAge, in an email to CRN. "He had helped HPi continue to be at the forefront of the industry. But with any change we are looking forward to the new CTO and what changes and vision they will lead at HPi."

Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, said he had met with Wall numerous times over the years.

"What I appreciated about him was a reasonable and grounded thesis of what the long-term future held, what it meant to end users and society, and moves that HP had to make to take advantage of the opportunity," Moorhead said in an email.

Earlier in his career, Wall spent nine years at HP between 1986 and 1995, according to his LinkedIn profile. He went on to spend 14 years at Intel before rejoining HP in 2012, according to the profile.

Key focus areas at HP for Wall included 3-D printing, which the company has begun to commercialize in recent years with its Jet Fusion line of commercial and industrial 3-D printers.

Speaking in 2018 during the HP Global Innovation Summit, Wall said that "digital manufacturing" will be the next wave of how physical products are made.

With that approach, "manufacturing is not done in one location, but it's spread around where it's actually consumed—and you're only manufacturing what you need," Wall said. "This is the vision that we're going after."