In an internal announcement to staff at HP, Vyomesh Joshi (known in the industry as VJ), Executive Vice President of Hewlett Packard’s Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) announced that there would be a major restructuring of the operation of IPG that would become effective on August 1, 2008. He announced that HP is to reorganise its Imaging and Printing group by consolidating the division from five groups down to three, in a bid to stimulate revenue growth and reduce costs within the company. The move will see HP consolidating the group into three areas, Graphics Solutions, Inkjet and Web Solutions and Laserjet and Enterprise Solutions.

The main interest for the printing and graphics markets is that all the organizations for this market will be incorporated within the Graphics Solutions Group. This will include HP Indigo, HP Inkjet High-Speed Production Solutions, HP Scitex, Speciality Printing Solutions and the new Light Production. This Graphics Solutions group will be headed up by Michael Hoffmann who currently holds the role of Senior Vice President responsible within IPG for HP’s Supplies Business. The other two new divisions are Inkjet and Web Solutions, and Laserjet and Enterprise Solutions. Stephen Nigro, will head Inkjet and Web Solutions and Laserjet and Enterprise Solutions  will be led by David Murphy.

These moves are a continuation of the Print 2.0 strategy that was first introduced last year to link the development of new Internet approaches and services to print, and developing the Internet related print business. In the past year since the Print 2.0 announcement HP has been going through a transition in how it handles the move to Print 2.0 working. HP has made a really major move over the past few years to built a major business in graphic arts, and it sees a major area of its future growth coming from this market. The structuring of this specific Graphics Solutions group is to put a major focus on the graphic arts markets. It is interesting that the forthcoming light production equipment that is expected in 2009 will be located in this group.