BANGALORE: From literally being a household name in India, Xerox Modicorp has transitioned three major movements in India since its inception. From that of copying to printing, from black and white to colour and from stand-alone analog to digital, networked products. Having moved into the solutions and services space, with the launch of Xerox Global Services, the company is now looking at new markets for its services. LV Sastry, Associate Director, Xerox Global Services reveals the company's future plans in a discussion with Sigi Achappa of CIOL.

Excerpts from the interview.

The evolution has a lot to do with market place. More and more large customers do not want to invest in technology, what I mean to say is that, they are looking for service. Technologies keep evolving and getting obsolete, so customers want services. According to market research firm IDC, companies spend up to 10 percent of their revenue on document production, management and distribution. So, companies would like these business processes to be taken care of. Xerox Global Services is catering to that need, so it can help recapture some of those costs by streamlining and digitizing document-intensive business processes. The services arm contributes $4 billion to Xerox Worldwide, which is a $16 billion company. And houses over 15,000 professionals globally.

We would like to change the mindset people have about Xerox as just a copier to being known as a digital solutions and services company. As of now, we have 12 major offices in India, and we are aiming to grow at 25 percent annually for the next three years and manpower would also be scaled up at the same rate. We are focusing on two aspects – working with large customers for printing and faxing, documentation on site, which is part of our customer on site infrastructure services. The other area is storage and retrieval of data. We are into the conversion of paper workflow to digital workflow. We are trying to help offices to improve efficiency in document output management. In this regard, we are offering an on site service called the Mailroom Service, which is about managing mail loads. For eg. We sort out mails (letters) and each document would get scanned and sent to the receiver via e-mail. Similarly, we process all outgoing production mail with automated systems to guarantee least-cost service.

Ninety percent of our market share belongs to telcos followed by BFSI and education.

We will expand our offerings based on market research. As far the Indian market is concerned, there has been no market research done in this area for me to quote figures, but the all I can say is that the market is really vast. Just considering the home segment itself, think about it, there are hundreds of documents in the house. So, that itself is a big prospect.

We continue to spend $ one billion in research and development. We spend at least 8-10 percent of our revenue for R&D.

I have not seen a paperless office anywhere. People have been talking about a paperless world for many years now. But, the consumption of paper has only been increasing. According to Giga research, the consumption of paper worldwide is increasing by 20 percent annually. E-mail is now seen as one of the biggest contributors towards paper usage. With over 700 billion emails being generated worldwide, half of them get printed.