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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.

While VARs continue to face razor-thin margins in the PC market, tiny ultraportable models--which tend to weigh less than 4 pounds and have screens 12.1-inches wide or less--carry more appeal for resellers because of the add-on sales of equipment, such as docking stations and monitors.

HP's NC 2400 is less than 1-inch thick and weighs only 2.8 pounds, but the vendor still managed to pack into the machine a built-in optical drive and full-size keyboard--both notable features for laptops of comparable size. Another key feature for HP was battery life, which the vendor estimates is a little more than 5 hours. HP also gives users the option of a 3-, 6- or 9-cell battery. The laptop is priced at $1,499, which falls at the lower end of pricing for ultraportable machines.

But subtle innovations that often go unnoticed by users are just as important, says Keith LeFevre, vice president and general manager of Americas Regional Business Unit, Business Notebook PCs, at HP.

He points to power-conserving features that automatically adjust screen brightness based on external lighting environments to save power; hard-drive protection features that secure the head of the hard drive to increase shock resistance if the laptop self-detects that it's in an ambulatory state; and security features that give users encryption capabilities for storing their passwords.

In the trade-off between features and weight that came with building the ultraportable device, HP opted to leave out the wireless WAN connectivity because of the immaturity of the market at that time. However, going forward, all HP laptops will have WWAN connectivity, as well as Wi-Fi, and HP identified advances in wireless networking as a key area for innovation.

"As carriers come online with better coverage where you can be effectively online anywhere, that has interesting applications down the road, where you might eliminate the need to have a lot of data and power-consuming capability from the notebook," LeFevre says.

NEXT: Digital-signage opportunities.

Networking features were a key differentiator in the Displays category, where ViewSonic took top honors with its NMP-500 Network Media Player and ND4200-LS 42-inch HD network display with built-in Internet Protocol (IP)--products designed for the growing digital-signage market.

The ability to remotely manage digital-signage displays via the Internet was a draw for VARs.

"You could pretty much have any information you want sent from the server, and we could manage it remotely," says Samuel Sanchez, vice president of marketing at Coastline Micro, a systems builder based in Irvine, Calif. "If we have to do any upgrades on the panel itself, we could do it from here, and end users could be anywhere on the planet."

Coastline Micro, like many other VARs in the display market, is moving deeper into the digital-signage space.

"A lot of the industry is going toward digital signage," Sanchez says. "It can be used anywhere in any type of business. You see it used in airports, grocery stores, malls, casinos and hotels. We really can hit so many verticals with this type of product."

The NMP-500, which can work with any ViewSonic display, is an IP-based media player with MPEG-1/2/4 video-stream capability for digital-signage applications. It eliminates the need for a dedicated PC to decode Flash, MPEG video and Internet browser information before being displayed.

The ND4200-LS display also enables five different applications to run concurrently to take advantage of the screen's 42-inch real estate. In addition, it has a built-in 40-GB hard drive, which can be used as a failover precaution or as a way to reduce network traffic loads.

Meanwhile, the remote-management theme continues in the whitebox and systems-building arena, where Raritan's KIRA100 KVM system-on-a-chip microprocessor took the crown for its ability to control servers and attach media at the BIOS level from anywhere over the Internet.

The chip was the brainchild of Raritan subsidiary Peppercon, a KVM-over-IP solution provider headquartered in Zwickau, Germany. By condensing its KVM-over-IP switch onto a single chip, Peppercon was able to bring the remote server-management capabilities of those switches right down to the motherboard level.

The KIRA100 chip enables remote OS installation, BIOS upgrade and power cycling on a server. For end users, it cuts costs and improves IT-management productivity, and for its server partners, the chip helps save board space and reduce system costs, Raritan says.

Since its launch a year ago, the chip has been adopted by several manufacturers.

"Manageability and power efficiency are the two big differentiating criteria server vendors have today," says Christian Paetz, one of the co-founders of Peppercon.

The chip supports the major industry standards for manageability, including Intelligent Platform Management Interface, Secure Shell, Web Services Based Management Protocol and Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware-Command Line Protocol. The chip also has a dedicated video controller for faster and higher-quality video resolution.