Cary Sherburne: I'm Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com and I'm here with Xavier Garcia, who is the General Manager of HP Scitex business. Welcome.
Xavier Garcia: Thank you.
Cary Sherburne: We talked earlier about the whole wide format market and some of the growth opportunities it has. If I'm a service provider say in the commercial print business wanting to add a higher value business such as wide format what are some of the things that I should be thinking about? How can HP help those folks move into this market?
Xavier Garcia: Yeah, there are many considerations that a print service provider has to take into account when getting into digital, but let me say that it’s going to be very important for him to understand what are the businesses, what are the applications that they are going to be focusing in, so then when making the decision of purchasing equipment versatility is going to be incredibly important both from the printer point of view, the press point of view, the ink that is supplied with that printer. So in that sense the customer will be able to offer many different things to many different customers, which is one of the good things of digital so you don’t to need to restrict yourself to a specific application, a specific customer. You can continue to invent and create new applications, so new business models that will be very profitable for them. The opportunity of digital is that you are not only capturing pages from analog, but also you can create pages that currently don’t exist, right, by variable data printing and sometimes their customers will not ask for those pages, but the print service provider can say well I can have this electronic **** for instance with my device and I can go to customer and offer him that perhaps at a slightly higher mark up, but it’s going to be very, very **** for the print service provider and for his customer.
Cary Sherburne: Yeah and you know you bring up a really good point because one of the things that print service providers should really be thinking about is how do I first educate myself and then secondly educate the brand owners because when I talk to brand owners I'm amazed at how little they know of the possibilities. So what are some of the things that HP can do to help these folks learn more about it and then in turn educate their customers?
Xavier Garcia: Yeah, so I think there will be like two main areas I would like to comment here. The first is that Hewlett Packard is working globally with many of those brand owners, so in many cases the customer will order specific brand owner, then in another place in the world he is already working with Hewlett Packard, so you can say hey look in Hong Kong I know that you are working with a print service provider that is using Hewlett Packard equipment, so the **** see what opportunities that this company can provide to you. That is one important part, the fact that we are a global company. The second is in education and training. Areas like **** where in the last year, year and a half we’re becoming very active on wide format printing as well. There is many resources, many opportunities for customers to understand how to use digital, to understand how to interact, what are the tricks and what are the experiences of other customers in this domain.
Cary Sherburne: And then you also have—through the capture program you have lots of tools and materials for them, online learning and all kinds of things.
Xavier Garcia: Yeah, absolutely-
Discussion
Only verified members can comment.