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PC and peripheral vendors continue to face the challenge of differentiating their wares in the increasingly commoditized hardware markets they play in, but IT solution providers singled out these vendors' technologies as products that delivered innovative, new features that both benefited end users and boosted their partners' bottom lines.

Ease-of-use was a top priority in the development of Lexmark's x644e multifunction printer, which scored the Lexington, Ky., printer-maker top honors in this year's VARBusiness Technology Innovators awards.

Printing vendors continue to see momentum in sales of multifunction printers, which they position as a way for businesses to consolidate devices and to move paper documents into electronic repositories, such as document-management systems. One key to the success of these initiatives, however, is ensuring that output devices are extremely intuitive and user-friendly.

As such, one of the chief innovative features of the x644e is its 8-inch, color touch-screen user interface, which Lexmark has enabled solution partners to customize to match customers' specific workflow processes.

The x644e is Lexmark's lowest-end MFP with the color touch-screen, and the printer is targeted at workgroups, branch offices and smaller businesses that need a basic level of customization to streamline workflow. Lexmark offers higher-end models, too, and those are geared toward more extensive customization.

"This [printer] is designed for those redundant processes, such as in an HR department, where you're recruiting and scanning in resumes every day and then sending those to an electronic document-management system or to managers to review," says Stephanie Morris, product marketing manager for MFP products, U.S. region, at Lexmark.

The x644e is also no slouch when it comes to speeds and feeds: The monochrome device can print documents at 50 pages per minute. It can also copy, scan and fax.

The x644e competes against such products as HP's 4345 series--which HP recently redesigned to increase the usability of its user interface--and Xerox's new WorkCentre 4150 MFP series.

Multifunction printers are a key area of innovation in the printing industry for resellers, as they offer a path to solutions and services sales that can bring in higher margins than just selling hardware alone.

In the mobile-computing category, Hewlett-Packard's HP Compaq NC 2400 ultraportable laptop earned the highest honors for innovation.

NEXT: The ultraportable appeal.