Xerox strategy to put color into enterprise

Xerox is still alive and in living color. The company unveiled its latest strategy with a pledge to bring color everywhere. The company is playing on its strengths by focusing on making color printing as cost effective and common as black and white in enterprise environments.

"Xerox needed to change in order to service its customers better service," said Bhuwan Kulshreshtra, General Manager, Marketing Office Systems Group, Xerox. By adding color to documents, Kulshreshtra said that you add value. He described the office as the "last bastion of black and white," lodged between the high-end and the low-end inkjet market.

Color at the enterprise level is inevitable. One of the major reasons for moving to color printing on-site is cost savings, Kulshreshtra insisted. In the long term it's cheaper for an office to do its own color printing in-house rather than have it outsourced, unless it's a high volume job.

Kulshreshtra claims that almost all the cellular service providers in the country use the company's equipment for their printing. Since the company has increased its color portfolio by launching wide format printers, it is now looking at other verticals also. 

Last year's acquisition of Tektronix's color technology has kept Xerox ahead of its nearest competitor, Hewlett-Packard. "HP is very slow on the laser side," said Kulshreshtra. "They don't have a single pass technology."

The worldwide color market is worth about $1 trillion and much of it is for the taking. The key to Xerox's success will be the company's ability to offer color-printing capabilities that are fast and affordable at a reasonable cost per page level.

"Customers want faster turnaround and the ability to make each printed document one of a kind," Bhuwan says. "Color products will rule in the office and Xerox will be there."

But technology, software and equipment aren't enough. Xerox has also placed a strong emphasis on professional services to better serve customers. Those services will be primarily at the high-end, but will trickle down to the enterprise level.

Kulshreshtra also emphasized on the fact that in the next five years the printing will totally be on Multi-function devices (MFD) but which technology will dominate color print systems in future is still up in the air he said. 

Though the company has generated revenue of Rs 552 crore, the printing business contributed only Rs 40 crore. That is because the company forayed into printing business in India last year only but this year the company is expecting the printing growth significantly. 

Rahul Gupta 

(CNS)