*NEWS*HP GETS OUT SPARRING GLOVES …….

[Anonymous]

HP Gets Out Its Sparring Gloves For Page-Share Rumble With Rivals
Honing
his public strategy and that of his company’s $24 billion imag- ing and
printing business, Hewlett-Packard Executive Vice President Vyomesh
Joshi says he now has his crosshairs set on stealing “page share”-the
total number of pages produced on HP machines, as a percentage of both
the printer and copier markets-away from the rival copier market.
In
a New York meeting with investors last month, Joshi said the company
and its emerging multifunction product lineup were girding for a battle
with the likes of Xerox, Ricoh and even its longtime technology
partner, Canon. “[The] copier [market] is a $24 billion market,” Joshi
said. “It’s actually flat to declining. But that’s not the way we think
about it. [We think,] ‘How do we really get our LaserJet product line
and put copy functionality [into it], and capture those pages?”
He
said HP will go after page share “aggressively.” At the core of HP’s
strategy is its still-nascent multifunction peripheral [MFP] business,
in addition to its growing offering of plug-and-play document
consulting offerings for the channel. While Joshi’s blueprint strategy
has met with some degree of success, solution providers suggest there
are still challenges ahead.
“I think we’re doing well with the
MFPs,” said Keith Grabel, president of Westwood Computer, a
Springfield, N.J.-based solution provider and HP partner. Grabel said,
though, that MFP sales in head-to-head competition with copier products
do better on a smaller level than across the entirety of major
enterprises. Solution providers and other vendors say that while
network-capable printers are generally sold to the IT department of an
enterprise, copier sales are more often made to facilities’ managers.
Traversing both types of organizations is an ongoing process.
“From
what I have seen the last three-plus years, winning some, losing some,
it’s more of a departmental play than a big company play,” Grabel said.
“We’ve been successful in smaller deployments.
In addition to
focusing on MFPs and managed print services, Joshi repeated his
assertion that the emerging space for in-house, marketing collateral
across vertical markets presents an opportunity where HP can outflank
copier rivals. Joshi also has said the company is poised to migrate its
new Scalable Print Technology-which it unveiled in 2005 in the low-end
of its product line-into higher-end printers and MFPs as early as 2006.
HP believes that technology that makes its print heads more efficient
and therefore better performers will give it a significant edge over
rival technology.
“We absolutely believe that if you build the right
portfolio for all the business we want to go after, there’s a
tremendous opportunity,” Joshi said.

[Author]

January 10, 2006 at 10:26 AM