HP makes a big push into enterprise space

Asim Raina

SAN FRANCISCO: HP today bolstered its enterprise imaging and printing product portfolio and strategy, including plans to increase the size and expertise of its sales force, to provide customers with unprecedented levels of service, information and business insight.

Making the announcement, Vyomesh Joshi, Executive VP (Imaging and Printing Group), HP, said, “By leveraging our strengths in IT and our expertise in imaging and printing, HP is best-positioned to capture, manage and deliver the intelligence that enterprise customers need to improve their business processes. This is not only about cutting costs. It’s about using HP’s services and solutions to help customers manage business information more efficiently, to gain productivity and a competitive advantage.”

As part of the announcement, the company shared its plans to make new investments in enterprise services and solutions and unveiled a new ink-based printing technology—HP Edgeline—specially designed to handle the high-volume workloads of businesses. Printers using this technology feature printheads that span the width of a page, so only the paper moves, not the printheads. This allows print jobs to be completed in one pass, quickly and precisely with excellent quality.

HP additionally announced its largest-ever rollout of multifunction printers, which are aimed at replacing copiers in businesses of all sizes. The company also announced the launch of the HP Halo Collaboration Studio in Asia Pacific and Japan, which enables customers to do business in a life-like, face-to-face environment regardless of the geographic distances separating them from their colleagues.

As part of a revitalized approach to make it easier to do business with HP, the company plans to hire hundreds of highly skilled sales consultants who will be dedicated to the company’s top 2,300 accounts. These experts will engage customers in conversations that go beyond simple cost cutting to understanding how to apply the information enabled by the imaging and printing devices on the network to build competitive advantage.

HP’s strategy includes establishing teams of specialists that can address customers’ broad business environments as well as their specific IT and end-user challenges. In addition to an account manager, each team will include specialists in technology, services and business processes with knowledge of the workflows, vertical applications and HP capabilities relevant to their customer’s specific needs—whether it is helping to optimize their infrastructure, manage their environment or improve their business workflows.

Finally, HP plans to tailor some of the more than 30 imaging and printing solutions within its portfolio to build industry-specific offerings for major vertical markets in the public and commercial sectors. Delivering proven expertise to new customers, the vertical solutions will address critical business needs such as improving processes, operational efficiencies, cost savings and revenue.

The first-of-its-kind design architecture of HP Edgeline Technology uses page-wide printheads to distribute ink rapidly and precisely in one pass. With the versatility and scalability to meet many customer needs, the technology will allow HP to expand its printer business into markets such as high-volume office printing, industrial printing and retail printing solutions, which together will represent an estimated $30 billion-plus market opportunity by 2009.

Early next year, HP plans to unveil this patented technology in the first device that combines the benefits of ink and laser. The company expects the products using this technology to redefine business printing with some of the best printing speeds, operating costs and reliability in its class while providing excellent text and graphics print quality using specially formulated HP Vivera inks.

(Travel for this story was sponsored by HP)

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