Digital Printing Continues To Be The Focus: Balaji Rajagopalan, Xerox

Xerox is looking to strengthen its products portfolio across all categories and aims to transform the way people think of printing, says Balaji Rajagopalan, Executive Director, Technology, Channels & International Distributor Operations, Xerox India.

While discussing about Xerox’s strategies and plans of the year, he also said that, CIOs are today trying to implement document management services (DMS) to reduce costs and better manage their printing fleet. Read on…

Tell us about the enterprise product portfolio of Xerox?
As mentioned above, Xerox operates in every spectrum today. We have devices which can specifically cater to the large enterprises, SMBs to print job owners. Customers have a wide range of options to choose from and our entire fleet of products fit into any sector, depending upon the customer’s choice and use.

How do you think document management industry in India has evolved over the past one decade?
Document management industry has evolved dramatically over the past one decade. CIOs are today trying to implement document management services to reduce costs and better manage their printing fleet. DMS delivers solid business benefits to enterprises of all sizes as the market shows continued growth. As per industry sources, the printing market in India is worth about USD 12 billion. According to Gartner, 15% of all ECM being undertaken is Document Management, with BFSI, IT/ITeS, retail and healthcare being the greatest adopters. In future, the industry is bound to witness more and more enterprises outsourcing their document management needs to leading global players like us for whom it is a core business.

Key verticals adopting DMS in India are financial services, banking, insurance, telecom, retail, manufacturing, consumer goods, healthcare, and life sciences and utilities, among others.

Today, the industry has certainly grown from what it was a decade back, but still there is a lot to happen in this space and we are pushing our solutions out in the marketplace and still educating customers on its needs and the benefits that it can produce.

What are the new opportunities that you see? Any new pockets that Xerox is looking to focus in?
Digital printing continues to be an area of focus for us. Within digital printing, we have seen a strong growth projection for the photo-printing segment. It is certainly growing and we are looking to tap this marketplace aggressively.

Today, with the growth of e-commerce, personalized printing is also on a rise. There are websites today that print your favourite picture as your phone cover, on coffee mugs and/or T-shirts etc. In an attempt to increase revenues and expand reach in a growing digital printing market, online photo-sharing and printing services start-ups are experimenting with new models beyond consumer photo printing. They are trying to tap into a unique opportunity India offers- a large event photography market.

How do you plan to grow your market share across categories in 2015?
We have a strong market presence in digital printing segment with over 30% market share. With the launch of Xerox Versant 2100 and the Xerox Color C60/70, we are sure that we will be able to further infiltrate the market and grow our presence.

In the A3 and A4 space, we are going to ramp up our product portfolio and dig deep in the market space. We have already brought in the next level of evolution with our revolutionary ConnectKey controller which allows our equipment to seamlessly integrate with the workflows, increased flexibility in scanning to text searchable PDFs/ various MS office document formats, mobile printing capabilities, connecting to the cloud and enhanced security and this feature will certainly attract a lot of customers in the A3 and A4 space.

What are your plans and strategy for 2015?
It is very important to understand that Xerox is the only company to offer wide range of product portfolio,spanning across all categories, from entry level laser printers to mid segment Multi-function devices under the WorkCenter category to high end production devices.

In 2015, we are looking to strengthen our products portfolio across all categories and revolutionize the way people think of printing.

We witnessed a good start to 2015 with few of our digital presses such as Versant 2100, Color C60/C70 seeing a positive uptake in the market. We have already done double digit installations for Versant 2100 and Xerox Color C60/70, both of which were launched late last year and are surely to replicate the same for our other machines in time to come. We plan to continue to maintain our lead in the graphic communications space by focusing on entry and high end production systems.

We aim to increase our market coverage in the office printer business, with a renewed emphasis to grow our A3 business and invest further in A4. We are looking forward to rolling out new Connect Key enabled devices that will offer true value to our customers, simplify workflow solutions and equip them to do much more than just printing. We plan to focus on the mid-market through key accounts and Xerox Partner Print Services (XPPS).

Our GTM approach will continue to be through our channel partners. We will bring in new initiatives, models and emphasize furthermore on training our partners, in order to optimize business opportunities. We are also equipping our partners to provide managed print services to the small and medium enterprises and we believe that this will further open up new avenues for our partners. Presently, we have over 10 partners who are fully equipped to provide these solutions and we will look at increasing this base in the years to come.