Elaine Wilde is the senior vice president and general manager of the Worldwide Graphic Arts Business at Xerox. She has been with Xerox for 25 years, and has worked a variety of sales, marketing, and general management positions, many of which touched on the graphic arts industry. Most recently, Elaine was vice president of marketing and strategy for Public Sector Operations, which markets to government and educational institutions. Other positions she has held include:

Vice president of U.S. Industry Marketing, where Elaine created a graphic arts customer council and a new marketing position to address graphic arts customers.

Vice president of the Solutions and Services Business, where she led the development and deployment of document management and production print solutions.

Vice president and general manager for Baltimore-Washington Operations, where she created and managed two dedicated Graphic Arts teams that integrated sales and support also as Vice president of quality for Xerox Engineering Systems.

Describe Xerox's services in terms of a corporate focus versus print provider focus.

Many of Xerox’s solutions and services are relevant to both corporations and print providers. So, while our print provider offerings are geared specifically to boosting the profitability of graphic arts firms, many also find useful lives inside corporations. The digital book production solutions that commercial printers and publishers use to produce paperback books can be tied into an enterprise resource planning system at a manufacturing company to produce just-in-time product manuals, for example.

Part of what differentiates our corporate and print provider services is the way they are tailored by our sales and analyst staffs, which have expertise in the various industries they serve.

The graphic arts business is a major portion of Xerox’s business. As their new worldwide leader, what are your immediate plans?

The graphic arts business is one of the great recent successes for Xerox and Xerox customers, and my goal is to make it even more successful moving forward. What’s at stake for our customers is the ongoing transformation of what we call the new business of printing - the influx of digital technologies that enable just-in-time, one-to-one marketing and e-services. Xerox is a leader in helping graphic arts providers to profit and grow by making this transition, and my goal is to make our offerings even more valuable to them.

We will accomplish this by continuing to work through our current five market segments which address creative services, commercial printers and prepress, quick and franchise printers, data center service bureaus and publishers. We will continue to develop partnerships modeled after those we have with Imation for digital color proofing and Presstek for digital offset presses, to meet specialized needs in these markets and to broaden our offerings. And, naturally, we will make the most of the Xerox product and solutions portfolio, which will soon break new ground with the FutureColor offering.

I also would like to stress that Xerox is totally committed to the graphic arts marketplace. Our graphic arts operation is a $3 billion business — which would make it the world’s second largest graphic arts firm if it were a separate company — and it is one of the key strategic organizations for delivering the major planks of the New Xerox, including color output capabilities and solutions and services. It’s definitely an exciting time to lead this business unit.

Explain the process of selling office equipment and offering print services to corporate clients and the partnering or selling similar solutions to print providers. Is there a conflict and how does Xerox deal with this?

Most businesses have conflicts of one kind or another, and yes, there are some potential conflicts in our corporate and graphic arts relationships. However, as we have increased our commitment to the graphic arts market in recent years, we have been working with out customers to address the issue. Specifically, we are reducing our deployment of Document Technology Centers (DTCs), which we established several years ago in response to market demand for off-site outsourcing of printing and, more recently, entire business processes.