Posted on Mon, Aug 09, 2010
With the surprising announcement that Mark Hurd has resigned from Hewlett Packard, what are the probable next steps for the giant IT company?
Hurd replaced Carly Fiorina as CEO of HP in 2005 and has led HP through a radical transformation over the past 5 years. Considered very strong operationally, Hurd cut costs, acquired a number of companies including EDS and Palm, and shifted HP’s focus toward a ‘converged infrastructure’ platform. Print remains an important component of HP, however many would argue that Hurd was not focused on this division, preferring to invest and acquire companies in other growth areas of the business.
From my past meetings with Mark Hurd (here’s an old blog from one session last year), I found him to have a lot of passion for the business and for turning HP into something other than a printing company (yes, that did hurt a bit). He constantly looked at Cisco & IBM as his two core competitors.
Chief Financial Officer Cathie Lesjak (24 years with HP) will take over as interim CEO until a new replacement is found. Interesting days at HP…
Posted on Wed, Apr 28, 2010
On the road to the MPS Conference in San Antonio via Las Vegas. A few notes from the HP Americas Partner Conference:
Mark Hurd took the stage yesterday, presenting to the largest HP partners across North and South America. A great speaker, Hurd made it clear HP is all about the economics...and the P&L performance of HP suggests he's delivering on that objective! While he didn't spend much time on HP's Imaging & Printing Group, he was very clear about HP's focus on growing their networking business. The data presented suggested 67% of CIOs have been mandated to reduce their carbon footprint within their IT group. HP says the new networking solutions are significantly more energy efficient that provide twice the capability, with a 30%-60% savings over previous technology. Sounds quite a bit like MPS doesn't it?!
Hurd discussed the capabilities and size of HP, in both a positive and negative light. From a positive, HP has a very integrated platform covering everything from the network to pcs to servers to printers. Oh, and HP just announced they're buying Palm...just another billion dollar ‘tuck in'! http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2010/04/28/hp-buys-palm.html
On the other side, he acknowledged the need to work on streamlining the vast operations within HP, understanding that many processes are simply too complicated & take far too long to get an answer on ‘anything'. They also discussed the significant learning they've been going through with their MPS program and the issues around constrained product. They were very clear on the ‘thank you' to their key partners for ‘sticking with' HP during this cycle.
On the whole, it was an excellent update from HP...now hitting the road to the Managed Print Services Conference in San Antonio. Looking forward to hearing the fresh insight from Photizo on their view of the market & where MPS now sits on the Hype curve.
Posted on Wed, Feb 10, 2010
News & Notes. Here were a few more sounds bites that I found interesting from the Lyra Symposium....
- Intel purchases more ‘green' power than any other company in North America. LaserNetworks is proudly ‘green powered' through Bullfrog Power & it's great to see so many companies paying attention to the environment. Congratulations to Brendan Peters & the guys at Intel.
- Second note on Intel...they have MIB technology that could substantially improve the ease & amount of information on a device. Cheers to Canon for picking it up...unfortunately, most of the other manufacturers are dragging their collective heals suggesting their IP is too important. Sounds a bit like Apple-MSFT, until MSFT began to open things up! Hopefully we don't need to wait another 20 years to pass these benefits on to our customers.
- The Managed Print Services Association was established late last year & already has more than 500 members. Congrats to Jim Fitzpatrick who is leading the charge & doing a great job. It's an honour to be a board member representing the Dealer Channel.
- Remanufactured toner for colour printers/MFPs increased at a rate of 35% in 2009 vs. 2008. Three drivers were cited for this growth: price increases from the OEM companies; toner/product constraints; improved technology/reliability of the remanufactured product.
- There are many ‘shades of green' when it comes to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) around the environment. Many of the larger companies are tracking their results, even when they're not perfect (congrats to HP on this one). Very disappointed that Ricoh published their CSR report...some confusing charts but not a single word about the environment. Wonder if there's a correlation between their lack of environmental awareness & their huge revenue drop in 2009? Excluding Ikon, Ricoh's revenue declines over the past four quarters have been: down 25%, down 30%, down 24%, down 26%.
- In 2009, the biggest companies in the print/copy space were HP @ $24billion (print only), Canon @ $23billion (excludes their Oce acquisition), Ricoh @ $17billion (includes Ikon), and Xerox @ $15billion.
- ‘Danger Zone' companies according to Lyra include Kyocera Mita, Sharp, & Toshiba...small percentage of their company's revenue with declining share and minimal investment in printing/copying R&D.
- Xerox acquisition of ACS is very different from HP's acquisition of EDS. ACS is in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) where EDS was true IT Outsourcing. ACS will represent approximately 30% of the combined revenue with almost 60% of the total employees.
- Memjet will arrive one day...a very exciting product that could truly impact productivity in the office. This deserves its own blog!
- Lexmark have some great new products & were recently awarded Buyer's Lab Mono MFP Line of The Year. Unfortunately for them, the timing of the global recession & the slowdown in hardware purchases has limited any significant marketshare growth for the company.
Posted on Mon, Feb 01, 2010
Called "The Road to Recovery", the 2010 LYRA Imaging Symposium provided some fresh light into the printing and imaging industry as it moves into the next decade. All of the traditional participants were there. The hardware (Printer & Copier) companies were there. The software companies were there. The analysts were there. The large remanufacturers were there. The USEPA (Environmental Protection Agency) were there. And we were there.
Some great presentations & conversations...and admittedly, a few head-scratchers.
Lyra Snapshop - Part I
Day 1 of the Conference started with a keynote address from Tom Codd, Sr. Marketing Director at HP. Overall, a very good presentation from one of the best companies in the print industry. Tom discussed HP's effort to shift their focus toward selling software & services...or a shift to learning & selling MPS. Other interesting points from Tom's presentation:
*The average worker spends 150hrs/yr seeking filed documents. I've heard this stat from Gartner & it still surprises me when I hear it. However, assuming it's accurate, that's three weeks/year per employee and certainly a reason to consider software & workflow solutions. Although it's important to understand the net time savings being realized under such a solution...and from an environmental perspective, do employees begin reprinting these documents over & over as the access is quick & easy? I expect the benefits are real & substantial but it does require additional data to confirm the actual benefits. LaserNetworks has deployed many software solutions over the past five years & have started to analyze these exact questions.
*HP sees the Enterprise client moving to a single partner with a single point of integration. Tom also suggested these enterprise clients are moving from a Labour-based model (Copier world) to a Technology-based model (Printer world). That does appear true when looking at the continued increase in printed pages as a percentage of total pages (printed and copied). Beyond this step, I had hoped to hear Tom acknowledge the shift from the Technology-based model to the Service-based model (LaserNetworks world), led by providers fully capable of supporting the technology. It's clear that technology can be important...however if you don't put the customer first in terms of service, you just may end up with some nice technology.
*HP acknowledged that a high level of productivity is critical when leaving a recession. This brought up some awesome debate. HP (and the other hardware resellers) make the case it's best to consolidate the number of devices & push culture change into the business...it's called the ‘Rip & Replace' model in the industry. From the competing side, which is the service-based companies, there were questions around how productivity could improve if workers didn't have ready access to the on-ramps & off-ramps...how far is too far to walk and what happens to device reliability with the increased volume pressure on the machines? I need to come clean & state that my position is with the Service group & that a company should maximize the consumption value of a device. This means getting the maximum useful life out of an existing device before recycling the asset. The best Managed Service agreement should not penalize a company with a higher Cost per Copy/Print for having ready access to hardware, and that may include personal printers. Here was an old post that discussed this productivity loss.
Given the Canadian Government's comment earlier this month that Real GDP growth will be stuck around 2%/year through this decade because we can't make workers more productive, let's give them the tools (software) & appropriate access to those tools (printers/MFPs)!!
Lots of other interesting things came up during the conference & will post in the coming days. In the meantime, the trip was great but it's sure nice to be home!!!