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Where are the synergies with ACS and how will they play with the channel?
Clearly, we’re not far down that path. We have so much work to do to fill out the large enterprise offering. The BPO push and need is amplified and very intense in large enterprise. They have sites all over the world, [tens] of thousands of employees, HR infrastructure, accounting infrastructure, customer care infrastructure. This explosion in BPO is around these clients saying, ‘Why am I spending all this money to do this and I have no scale? Can I actually get scale partnering with someone?’ Our focus is on that for the near future. But no, there’s no doubt there will be a set of questions and an appetite by Xerox and by partners so that we can morph some of these offerings [and] figure out how they can be applied to the customer base our partners cover.
Should resellers be thinking about that now and actually preparing their businesses for those prospective opportunities, and what should they be doing?
The way they set themselves up is by focusing on the solutions offerings. BPO is about that. Mobile print is about taking a set of technologies and work processes. MPS is about a work process. The way that resellers can get ready for a broader services bent is to take advantage of the services and solutions that are available to them today. It won’t take them a long time, but there will be some time to get some of these simple solutions out.
EConcierge is the first example. Managed print services has been around for a long time, but partners around the world and industries around the world have only been kind of doing it a little bit. Now the need is unbelievably intense. A normal tech cycle, anything you do, whether it’s IT infrastructure or MFP devices or routers, is one that drives price down by innovation.
If you think about the first BlackBerry, it cost $1,000 and the second one that came out cost $900. The cycle time between them, with increased functionality and decreased cost, is shortening.
If you’re an IT reseller and all you do is sell hardware, the pressure on you every day is intense for new ways to make more revenue. We know for sure [end users] are saying how you can generate more revenue is to help me pull this stuff together, to help me understand my work processes and how technology and solutions can make that more efficient. The highest-level BPO is that. The simplest BPO entries are to do BPO around the expertise you have, around technology resources. I don’t think they have to do much more than that to start practicing and engaging in a broader set of discussions with their clients.
So VARs have to learn to walk before they can run when it comes to BPO and managed print services?
Yes. By the way, we’re not ready to have them run today. The solutions we have are definitely not packaged for someone to just walk up the street and set up a call center for someone. If we’re going to get to the point where we actually do engage partners, we have to make sure we make these things ready. Right now the market for that is not as high in demand as the market for it in the high enterprise.
How do you see the migration from Web-based tools to app-based tools?
An amazing nuance in that question is very important. I’m going to move not from Web-based to app-based but from Web- and ground-based to app- and cloud-based. Basically what happened in the past is you had to have your own stuff -- your own server, your own infrastructure, your own software people, your own security, your own everything.
Large enterprises tend to grab on to new technology first, but they don’t actually morph it faster than smaller enterprises, which don’t have all this infrastructure to carry the burden of inefficiency.
So what’s happening in the application of technology today, in hardware and software, is things are moving to app-based [models]. You package it in a way that you can use it. All the stuff you had to have before gets peeled off and used in a descaled, central way for you. Also, you can buy in chunks that you can afford and understand. The world has changed amazingly, with the simple words of ‘app-based’ and ‘cloud.’ I mean, we say something about cloud in every speech. Cloud this, cloud that. And if you don’t, people think that you’re not hip.
The way to think about cloud is you used to have to have everything. If you wanted to cook a meal, you needed your own kitchen. With the cloud, you go to a restaurant and buy only the things you need on a plate already plated for you. And the cloud allows you to virtualize a lot of the infrastructure that you have. You don’t have to be an expert and it is relatively simple. It allows you access and a place to park resources you have in a shared environment. So you don’t have to have your own servers, your own farms of computer technology. You can literally do it in a public cloud, which has some limitations, but you can also do it in a private cloud. Applications, which is the putting together of all this stuff, is basically solutions and business processes, and cloud allows you to move significantly faster and to be more efficient. You don’t create as much waste.
The normal utilization of a multifunction printing device is about 15 percent. So you buy this thing that works 60 pages a minute and because you don’t work 24 hours a day, and because you work and are not printing, you buy this technology and whole hours of the day your infrastructure is not used and you’re paying for this thing to sit. With applications in the cloud all you to do is access and share across this amazing environment. And it doesn’t require you to have to understand solutions.
So how does that tie into what you’re doing in document management?
How it connects to document management is directly. One of the things I said earlier is if you look at the normal utilization of a piece of technology in your office, a scanning device, a printing device, first of all you have too many of the damn things. Everybody has one at their desk. So instead of having a workgroup-shared device that probably has a utilization of 25 percent, you have 500 single-function things that have a utilization of 5 percent each. The whole idea about document management in its most basic offering is to just look at the client’s work environment. Understand the work that this client does at the most basic level. Manage the topology of document devices, connected through software and management processes. How do you keep it up? How do you make sure the paper’s in? How do you make sure the toner is in? Managing that to take the number of document devices and consolidate it down to the most efficient configuration you can have, that’s what managed print services is all about.
The next higher level or increasingly complex level is to say you also have a set of workers that are mobile. And they need to have access to documents. Your mobile workers change and you have to scale and deliver communications for a specific client. How do you put in place, you, Mr. Reseller selling to the paint store down the street, something he can generate on the fly, on the road? A set of collaterals that he can leave behind when he doesn’t even know for sure who he will run into?
Having a mobile print solution is not just having an iPhone and printing one page. I want to have access to applications that Xerox and its partners can work to set up that are industry-specific. If you’re going to a small hospital we can help you develop a set of collaterals in short time with a client’s name on it. You can have that without all of the infrastructure, the collateral database by yourself. Think about that all the way up to the most complex processes where you have to package together a set of IT infrastructures which the value-added resellers can provide to a client today and expand that to document technology where you literally become the office-in-a-box for a small business.
NEXT: On The Competition
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