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HP builds new strategy around digital publishing

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CIOL Bureau
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MUMBAI: HP would be closely looking at digital publishing, convergence and pervasive printing as the three key areas of growth during the forthcoming year. Vyomesh Joshi, Vice president, Imaging and Printing Group (IPG), Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) was quite clear that the company would sustain double-digit growth through its core, emerging and new business areas.



Presently, 60 percent of HP’s revenue comes from its core business, 25 percent from emerging areas and 10 percent-15 per cent from new business. Joshi was on a one-day visit to India to outline the group’s strategy for the year 2003. HP’s strategy would essentially focus on providing technology and solutions that are simple to own, buy and operate.



He charted three key areas of growth that focused around the digital publishing opportunity, convergence where the trend is to drive enormous changes in workflow processes and printing through mobile wireless printing. HP’s IPG business accounts for $ 20 billion.



HP reported the largest consumer product rollout in its history in 2002 with more than 50 imaging and printing products being rolled out worldwide between now and early 2003. More than $ 1.2 billion were invested in R&D over the last three years to reset the printing and imaging market. This meant a strategic intent to shift to AiO and driving the digital imaging mainstream translating into 30 new products in AP, beginning at $ 49 and more than 1,000 patent applications on hardware and cartridges. HP currently has more than 6,000 worldwide patents. The strategy would be to win on the low end.



"The way I look at our business is the number of pages being printed. Digital printing accounts for only four percent of the pages printed. Content creation has gone digital. Analog printing today accounts for more than 96 percent of all pages and therein lies the opportunity to make the whole value chain very efficient. The entire music value chain has gone digital. Most content has also gone digital. And that is really what I would like to do- provide end-to-end workflow that is digital. The acquisition of Indigo is the first step in the value chain," he explained.



Joshi quoted the Gartner Group report, which pointed out that organizations which typically print and then distribute paper documents have begun a transition to new workflow processes in which digital content can be stored, retrieved, integrated and distributed whenever and wherever it is needed. "HP’s strategic move is to capture pages via increased capabilities in products. The intent is to improve productivity and reduce costs for customers and drive color adoption," he said.



Joshi said that multifunction printers represented a key opportunity to reduce costs and improve productivity within their businesses. He cited the example of a large aerospace company where 5,000 devices were in use supported by eight IT personnel.

The solution meant implementing an integrated print management solution and switching to a cost per page model. This resulted in a hard cost savings of more than $ one million annually for the company.



The third key area would be to tap a large portion of the workforce that is mobile and work towards means to make printing simple for these mobile professionals. According to IDC, this trend towards mobility is expected to continue as IT mobile/wireless spending grows to $ 83 billion by the year 2005. Joshi said that the company was working to enable anywhere, anytime printer access with the Internet being the medium.



Asked to comment on the rationalization of the channels post merger with Compaq, Joshi replied that 97 percent of business came from channel partners and this would continue. He added that the APAC revenues have been growing by 10 percent every year. India will grow faster, he predicted.

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