Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, Focused on the Core

It was the sort of Herculean task that makes or breaks chief executives: transform a stumbling giant of a company into a powerhouse entity, capable of battling toe-to-toe with some of the most recognizable rivals on the planet. Such was the challenge facing Xerox CEO Ursula Burns when she took the leadership reins from Anne Mulcahy in 2009.

By then, Xerox had already endured a gauntlet: the ascendancy of digital bits over paper as the lifeblood of business communication, and the accompanying decline in sales of copier equipment, had dragged down the company’s outlook—right in the midst of fierce competition with the likes of Hewlett-Packard. That was a decade ago, and the comeback (initially on Mulcahy’s watch) involved everything from significant downsizing to a revamp of Xerox’s product lines. In perhaps its most significant bet on its future, though, the company also plunged into the $185 billion business-process outsourcing (BPO) market.

In its bid for a piece of that market, Xerox now offers enterprises everything from human resources and customer-care services to managed print and data-management solutions. Moreover, those efforts seem to have paid off. According to research firm Gartner, Xerox owned some 5.1 percent of the BPO market in 2010, second behind Automatic Data Processing at 7.1 percent but ahead of First Data (4.8 percent), Accenture (2.4 percent), IBM (2 percent) and Paychex (1.6 percent).

Copiers might seem a world apart from BPO. But according to Burns, they’re really quite similar: Both offer businesses the ability to simplify their daily operations.    

“Why did we build copiers?” she asked rhetorically during a sit-down at January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “To streamline business processes.” In the beginning, copying documents involved workers laboring by hand. That was time-consuming, with a high probability of error. Typewriters sped things somewhat. Still, it took copiers to bring the whole process to an efficient peak, but the ability to print dozens of double-sided documents per minute wasn’t necessarily Xerox’s raison d’ être: “Copying is a byproduct of some other passion we had.”

That same passion, she added, currently powers Xerox’s BPO efforts. It’s a deft way of presenting Xerox’s pivot from technology to services as less a drastic change in course and more of a logical, perhaps inevitable progression. It also justifies some of the acquisitions the company has made over the past few years, including the 2009 deal for Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) for $6.4 billion in cash and stock.

ACS itself had been developing its BPO for various industries, including telecommunications and financial services, well ahead of the Xerox acquisition. Those offerings extended to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and private cloud deployment.

According to Lynn Blodgett, former CEO of ACS and now Xerox’s president of Services Business, the Xerox acquisition accelerated ACS research. “What we’ve gained is access to a genuine research capability,” he said. “It added a dimension we didn’t have, and frankly we didn’t have the budget.” In return, ACS brought a host of data and real-world business issues for Xerox’s research apparatus to digest, strengthening its nascent BPO efforts. 

Following the ACS acquisition, Xerox snatched up a handful of smaller companies, all with an eye toward adding even more muscle to what Burns described as “an innovating engine tuned to solve business problems” in areas as diverse as retail and consumer, shipping and logistics, transportation and the energy industry.   

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