CRN Interview: Xerox CEO Aims To Create Value For Partners

CRN: Last week, it was announced that Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is making a strategic investment in a company called Powerset that's developing natural language search technology. Is Xerox going to be competing with Google?

MULCAHY: (Laughing) It's hard to tell. But I do think that there's a field of natural language search that has not yet been optimized, and certainly PARC has a legacy for research over decades in natural language search that I think is world-renowned. I do believe that at some point, it's been difficult, but when it becomes feasible to use a natural language search approach it will take off and challenge the current Google architecture. So we are pleased to be an investor and equity partner and participant in [Powerset], and it's very consistent with a model we have for PARC.

CRN: Regarding Xerox's channel push, was there anything specific where everyone inside your organization just looked at the situation and said, 'Working with the channel is the best way to grow, and this is the way we have to do it.'?

MULCAHY: I wouldn't say it was just cultural, I would say it was culture. It was investment -- how much can you stretch at what point in time? It was technology. It was having the right set of capabilities as well to create value for the channel. I think all of those pieces needed to come together to make it a real robust approach to getting a return as it relates to both the channel and Xerox.

During the last 18 months, we clearly have been focused on sources of growth and have identified three of them. And that's our services for enterprises, color and SMB. SMB is absolutely just an extraordinary opportunity for Xerox because of the fact that we are not well-represented there and it's a new source of revenue. I think that over the last two years, we feel a lot more comfortable with our relationship with the channel, our ability to extend our reach there and the timing of all these product introductions so the portfolio is rich. And not just the product side of it, but services and solutions side of it -- being able to present solutions like PagePack, Docushare and Scanflow Store. All of these add meat around the bones that differentiate us for the channel as well. So I think a lot of things came together. ... And we're willing to be smart about extending our reach in all of our channels in a way that delivers growth.

NEXT: How Xerox will deal with the competition.