State of Technology: In Living Color
Brownlee’s experience matches what most VARs told VARBusiness in the latest quarterly State of Technology survey, on peripherals and security. HP and Xerox far outpaced the field, with 60 percent citing HP as highly innovative and 34 percent naming Xerox.
Among the respondents, 27 percent rated Canon high in innovation; 26 percent cited Epson; and nearly 25 percent cited Lexmark.
According to the channel, printer and imaging innovation is coming largely from networked color printers. Multifunction printer technology, despite its popularity with customers, is becoming less innovative, the survey found.
When it comes to innovation, both HP and Xerox have helped themselves along by rolling out strong product refreshes over the past two years, solution providers say.
HP recently refreshed its entry-level and midrange LaserJet line with several new models that offer faster print speeds and lower pricing, two key factors solution providers look at when it comes to innovation, according to the study.
HP was a latecomer to the color and multifunction printer arenas, but the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has made up ground and gained significant market share over the past year.
In conjunction with International Paper, the vendor launched new color-laser-toner technology called ColorLok, which dries three times faster than previous toners. ColorLok also boasts an improved color palette and 40 percent darker black, aimed at providing sharper documents.
On the inkjet front, HP released its Vivera inks nearly two years ago, which increased printing speeds by about 40 percent and was more resistant to fading than its previous inks. The new inkjet technology revived HP’s struggling inkjet line.
But the stakes are highest on the enterprise front. HP was late to market with competitive color and multifunction printing devices in a market awash in competition from Canon, Lexmark, Ricoh, Oki Data and others.
The most significant competitor in the high end, however, is Xerox, says George Mulhern, HP’s senior vice president of enterprise imaging.
HP and Xerox now find themselves locked in a battle for the enterprise, but, while their target is the same, their stories are very different. HP is touting its heritage as a supplier of distributed solutions while arguing that Xerox is more copier-centric in its approach to document management.
“They come from a centralized copy model where they have fewer devices and try to drive as many pages as you can to a smaller number of centralized devices,” Mulhern says. “The more pages you can drive to that, the more cost-effective the model becomes.”
Mulhern contends that, with HP’s WebAdmin administration interface and its recently launched universal print driver, the company’s enterprise printers are easier to maintain.
“We think with our print expertise, as well as [the channel’s] networking and IT expertise, we are very well-positioned to put a bigger and bigger roll into this market going forward,” Mulhern says.
The universal print driver is intended to provide compatibility with all HP PCL5 and postscript-emulation print drivers. The technology allows customers to deploy just one print driver for all HP printer products, reducing the likelihood of driver incompatibilities.
HP recently refreshed most of its LaserJet line with systems that are more competitive than prior models, particularly in the color and MFP segments. Meanwhile, Xerox is upping the ante by focusing on broadening the installed base of its color printers.
The company recently launched a $3,000 color printer, the Phaser 7400, which prints 36 pages per minute in color and 40 ppm in black-and-white.
“Our focus now is to try to bring the color technology to everybody’s office, not just graphic-arts environments,” says Kevin Marks, a worldwide marketing manager at the Xerox Office Business Group. “And you do that by making it affordable.”
To Brownlee’s point, printers are getting faster, better and cheaper. And while that’s good for the customer, margins on the printers are tighter than ever, says the Computer Asset Management’s chief.
“There are absolutely no margins left in hardware,” he says. “You need to do on-site support and hotline phone support, as well as application support.”
Indeed, that’s where the real innovation lies.