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SAN FRANCISCO—Enterprises should expect more services from Hewlett-Packard Co.s printer and imaging business to help them manage the range of printers, faxes and copiers spread throughout their operations.
During his keynote presentation at Seybold Seminars San Francisco 2003 conference here, Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president of HPs Imaging and Printing Group, said the company will make a more aggressive push into enterprise services by arguing that companies can reduce their total cost of ownership of printing and imaging equipment by consolidating its management.
“We need to start linking all these things together,” Joshi said. “The IT network is the glue.”
The Palo Alto, Calif., company introduced a set of imaging and printing enterprise services in March that included outsourcing, per-page billing and on-demand ordering of direct-mail collateral.
Supporting an average enterprise printing user costs $1,500, including the use of the equipment, supplies and paper, Joshi said. But the printing process largely remains dispersed among departments—from IT managing printers and facilities overseeing copiers and faxes to marketing departments handling direct-mail services and graphics departments designing high-end reprographics, he said.
Enterprises rarely know how much they spend on printing overall, and when they do consider cost, they still focus on the cost per copy rather than the total cost of printing, Joshi said.
Joshi declined to offer details of any new services but said during a question-and-answer session that customers will see HP “move forward with this message as we move forward in the fall.”
Beyond services, HP is also likely to push further into enterprise-class digital copiers. (Joshi acknowledged that the biggest gap in HPs imaging line is in the area of digital copiers.)
To advance in the copier business, HP at the end of August announced a partnership with Konica Minolta Holdings Inc. to develop products that combine Konicas copier engines with HPs technology. A Japanese newspaper, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, reported that the products would include five types of copiers over the next three years, with the first coming in October.
When asked about forthcoming digital copier products from the partnership, Joshi declined to offer any details.
Seybold Seminars San Francisco 2003 runs Sept. 8-12.
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