Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com and I’m here with George Promise who is Vice President of Continuous Forms Production for InfoPrint Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ricoh.

George Promis: Yep, that’s right.

Cary: So, perhaps you can talk to us a little bit about what’s going on with the InfoPrint 5000, your inkjet offer for the marketplace?

George: Yeah. We’ve… I think the InfoPrint 5000; we’ve had great success with it. It’s penetrated the market worldwide. We’ve got a significant market share and we’ve taking that family and expanded it. We’ve got currently three different platforms today we’ve now announced. We’ve got… the one we announced in 2007, which today we can still bring customers to that level of product what we’re shipping today. Anybody that bought one three years ago, we’re able to upgrade them in our customer office to that level, and we’ve now classified that model as the InfoPrint 5000GP, for General Production.

Cary: Okay.

George: We’ve introduced a InfoPrint 5000MP for Multi-Purpose. Initially when we first introduced it last year, it was for the purpose of doing Miker and Mono and now were showing at the showroom floor the capabilities of upgrading that to a full color capability. So it’s kind of an entry level model with the General Production, the GP, being our mid range product and we also now launched our VP, our Volume Production, that will be starting to ship mid this year. And it’s a very high volume capable. It’s still using the same technology, small footprint, very low power production, fully capable, it’s postscript, PDF, and AFP, we’re working on today our IPDS offering. And today we are the only vendor in the industry that has capabilities within the page to do multiple drop sizes, which gives us better quality and lower ink usage.

Cary: And so where do you see this going in the future. Is it going to be wider or is it going to be faster, I mean, how is that gonna….?

George: I think we’re going to grow with what customers are asking us for and what customers are looking for. We’re going to continue to enhance the product for it to provide more economical workflows, improve their sustainability, their efficiencies in their printing capabilities, and we’re going to continue to expand what customers ask for. And I think we’ve got long lists of requirements. We have customer councils both worldwide councils and European councils of where we’re getting inputs from customers. So we’re going to grow the produce where we see the market going and where our customers want us to take it. And with the share that we have today and the importance of the product, I think you’ll see some great changes in the future and continue to work what we’ve been doing so well with… we’re not going to give up on what we’ve been doing well at.

Cary: You know, I find it interesting that, you know, we’ve… this product sort of fits in that transpromo application, that’s one of the good applications for it. And I never liked that word. And I notice that Infoprint’s using the term “precision marketing,” I think that’s really interesting. How did that come about?

George: Well I think it was a… I think transpromo got somewhat of a cliché in the printing industry, everybody started using it. And what we really tried to do is utilizing it one-to-one for customer relationship management or if it’s a one off printing or the ability to really target certain customers. So we said, precision marketing is being able to take something in like a telescope on a gun, being able to precisely market to some point of time or some point person or some market they want to go after. So precision market was to define a little bit better term of what the intent is, to utilize a statement or an output document to target some area, whether it be industry, a person or a type of a cross-selling opportunity.

Cary: I also think it’s terrific that you guys have done so much work with the CMO Council, so I just wanted to congratulate you on that. You had some wonderful information that, you know, you’ve been able to work with them and make it available to the market in general.

George: Yeah.

Cary: It’s terrific.

George: Well I think…

Cary: Thank you for that.

George: …the whole thing on precision marketing is you have to be tied in closely with the marketing people.

Cary: Exactly.

George: And so that’s the intent is to tie in because if the marketing people are… are not involved in it, you’re probably not doing a good job with precision marketing.

Cary: And my friend, Sandra has done a great job there.

George: Yeah, he does fantastic job.

Cary: That’s great. So. Well thank you very much.

George: We’re glad to have her. Well thank you very much.