Valerie Vargas from AT&T.  I’m here at the PODi App Forum 2012, very excited to have just finished a keynote address to a wonderful audience of solution providers.  Had a chance to share with them this morning about an initiative we kicked off at AT&T called the Managed Print Solutia Provider Initiative.  And MPSP, as it’s nicknamed and internal to our company, is an opportunity to create a center of excellence at the point of bidding and production that ultimately drives efficiency and cost savings for AT&T.  

At AT&T, the direct marketing front, there’s a couple initiatives.  I have a lot of customers to talk to; we have over 100 million customers.  We have to do lots more with lots less, there’s always budget restrictions and challenges there, so become more efficient and to ultimately drive incremental stimulated responses.  To do that, we need variability and print on demand capabilities that will allow us to customize communications down to specifics to a customer of information they need for where they live and work that are improvements about our network performance information, could be opportunities of new products and services they might want to purchase, all the way down to basic information about being a customer of ours.  

As I shared in my keynote this morning, I encourage everyone to lean forward and not sit back.  If there’s one thing we’re doing at AT&T, it’s pushing the edge of the traditional envelope.  Right?  And so bringing new process, new solutions, new capabilities, new formats, new ideas to the table is key critical for us and for the partners that we select.  So that means, bring ideas that aren’t static to a single medium, if they’ve got an idea that can grow the breadth and depth across different tactics, we’re absolutely open to that.  And the partners that we end up working with are willing to lean forward with us on pushing those frontiers.