The Future of Managed Print Blog

My meeting with Mark Hurd, Chairman & CEO of Hewlett Packard

I must admit it’s fairly rare when I’m in a meeting with the Chairman of a $100 Billion company. However, this was my experience last week…a 60 minute roundtable discussion with Mark Hurd and nine other major Canadian VARs (Value-Added Resellers). LaserNetworks is recognized as the leading Managed Print Services (MPS) company in North America and I was very honoured to represent both LaserNetworks and the Canadian Print industry at the meeting. The other nine participants represented other areas of HP’s business, including networking, PC’s, software, services, etc.

As a company that doesn’t ‘push’ hardware on their customers, it’s always interesting to listen to a manufacturer of hardware. Often the public message sent to customers isn’t the private message sent to Resellers. However, Mark Hurd was different. In terms of printing, Hurd both understands and appreciates the LaserNetworks model of Customer First…focus on maximizing the useful life of printer assets. He was also understanding of true balanced deployment vs. the more common ‘Rip & Replace’ messaging you hear from other major manufacturers (part of ‘the last thing I want to do is sell you a copier today’). Hurd truly believes the print industry needs to shift towards a Managed Print model…similar to the one LaserNetworks pioneered with the Cost Per Page© program in 1996. It was great to hear Mark Hurd & I’ll definitely support his direction, as long as it doesn’t mean we have to sell more hardware!