Cary Sherburne:  Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne and Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com and I'm here with Harel Ifhar, who is Strategic Marketing Manager for HP Scitex.  Welcome.

Harel Ifhar:  Good morning.  It’s good to be meeting you.

Cary Sherburne:  Thank you.  And maybe you could tell us a little bit about your title and what that means.  What is it that you do?

Harel Ifhar:  Okay, great, I’ll be happy.  So, I’m managing Scitek strategic marketing.  We’re responsible for defining the long-term strategy of Scitek.  Practically, what we are doing, is we are analyzing the market.  What are the market trends, how will the market evolve and how will the market look in the next three to five years?  We are using lots of technologies, lots of analysis that we are doing with print service providers, with the entire ecosystem of the print service providers, in order to understand where this industry is going to.

Cary Sherburne:  And then you also work with the different research firms that follow the industry.

Harel Ifhar:  Definitely, because our mission is to understand where is the industry going to and we need to make sure that we put the millions of dollars of R&D investment in the right places.  Because HP is the leader in this market, it’s our responsibility to make sure that we are ahead of the technology, we know where we are going to, and we are coming to our print service providers with innovations, with new technologies, with new business ideas, how to do daily to evolve their business.  We have a great responsibility here to make sure that we have the right investment and bring the right solution to the print service providers.

Cary Sherburne:  And so far, you’re obviously well received in the marketplace because, you know, you’ve got a lot of big install base out there, but you also work on, the print service provider, you also work on the enterprise side, or the brand owner side as well, right?

Harel Ifhar:  That’s correct.  This is part of the power and the leadership of HP.  We work with print service providers, with work with conventional printers, we work with the brand owners, and we are leveraging the fact that we have established relations and contacts and knowledge from all those companies.  We are taking all them into consideration and this saw some of the tools we are using in order to bring to market innovation.  Innovation, it’s not only technology and new solutions for print service providers, it is also new business initiatives, how to allow business, new business, to print service providers, what new technologies, what new concept they can offer to their customers.  The way we see it, print service providers’ mission is not only to take orders and to deliver them, it’s also to offer new services and new ideas and concept to their end customers.

Cary Sherburne:  And, you know, often times it’s difficult, if you’re running a business day to day as a print service provider, it’s very difficult to keep up on those trends yourself, so that’s a terrific service that you’re offering, is to be able to educate them and say, “You know, here’s what’s coming and here’s kind of what you need to do to be prepared.”

Harel Ifhar:  This is the part of the role of a market leader, we are doing that because we want to keep the momentum, we want to leverage the power of HP, we want to make sure that we bring the value that HP has with all of those touch points of the market and bring it as a value to print PSP’s and help them be successful in their business.  This is our mission and we are focusing a lot of energy, a lot of our R&D budget in order to make sure that we have all those tools to help them be successful in the next three to five years.

Cary Sherburne:  And this is a global initiative.

Harel Ifhar:  Definitely it’s a global initiative, we are leveraging some of the things that we are learning in one side of the world to the other side of the world.  The world is becoming flatter, but there are some flavors to different regions and we are leveraging all that to make sure that we have the right solution and we see the future, we are ready for it.

Cary Sherburne:  That’s great.  Thank you very much.

Harel Ifhar:  You’re welcome.