Xerox Statement on Production Print Strategy
Press release from the issuing company
Building upon our Reinvention, Xerox continues to simplify our offerings to ensure we have the right mix of products and software that align with the evolving needs of our clients.
Xerox is putting a greater focus on our innovative technology in workflow automation, intelligent assistant services, and personalization including our suite of Xerox® FreeFlow® Workflow Software, Predictive AI Pro and XMPie®. These tools paired with our end-to-end approach to productivity - pre-press, on press and finishing enable us to deliver more value to our clients through our robust production offerings, making them more successful, productive, and competitive.
To support this focus, Xerox’s production portfolio continues evolving to best suit our clients' needs.
Xerox is preparing to discontinue manufacturing of the Xerox® iGen® 5 Press and the Xerox Nuvera® Presses, two legacy platforms that helped create the Production Print industry. Order fulfillment for iGen and Nuvera is expected to continue through 2024 or while inventory lasts. Xerox will provide industry-leading support for these platforms throughout the life of their contracts.
The Xerox® Iridesse® Production Press, Xerox® Versant® Press and the Xerox® PrimeLink® digital printers, enabled by the recent multi-year contract signed with FUJIFILM Business Innovation Inc., continue serving client needs across a wide variety of applications from photo and book publishing to folding cartons. This line-up of presses complete with Xerox technology uses scalable production print technology suitable for a broad range of print providers – including in-plant, commercial printers, and agencies – providing significant growth opportunities. Xerox will continue taking and fulfilling orders and providing life-of-contract support for the cut sheet Xerox® Baltoro® HF Inkjet Press as we evaluate strategic options for our high-speed inkjet technology.
Additionally, Xerox recently entered into an agreement with a third-party provider of high-speed continuous feed inkjet for Xerox clients who require high-volume continuous feed printing.
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Discussion
By David L. Zwang on Apr 30, 2024
It's always sad to see an innovative industry stalwart's position reduced to that of a distributor. It should be a lesson for others that feel they can satisfy some greedy and misinformed shareholders with a substitution of innovation for the wholesale slashing of costs.
By Robert Godwin on Apr 30, 2024
Xerox innovation died sometime in the 1990's. The iGen was a great idea, poorly supported and left in the hands of a sales team that thought it was a big photocopier. Xerox is this century's Kodak; a thought leader that could not stop looking in the rearview mirror.
By Patrick Henry on Apr 30, 2024
It's hard to believe that the company that invented print on demand on the distribute-and-print model with the DocuTech platform has come to this. I guess it demonstrates that no matter how groundbreaking a new technology might be, innovation alone isn't enough to sustain the innovator over the long haul.
By Robert Godwin on Apr 30, 2024
XEROX, the exemplar of a noun that became a verb and is now evolving to an extinct term.
By Jacob Aizikowitz on Apr 30, 2024
The iGen played an important role in convincing my investors to trust the commercial outlook for XMPie; hence, it's saddening to see its end of life approaching.
From 1995 to 1999, my team and I at Scitex developed software and hardware for a novel DFE for digital printing and VDP. We collaborated closely with the Xerox team that developed the iGen (we collaborated with other teams as well), so we knew their vision and understood its centrality to Xerox's future.
When founding XMPie (1999, 2000), I pointed out our Scitex Days relationships with Xerox to investors as part of my fundraising efforts. It turned out that Xerox was not a good reference for the VCs—they knew it as a financially troubled company without a future.
The iGen was the savior. I told the VCs that there is a secret gem named iGen, which we are intimately familiar with from our Scitex days, that is not yet part of the Xerox financials. But, once deployed commercially, it is expected to repeat, in color, the widespread success of DocuTech, and XMPie would be a leading software that would drive jobs to the iGen. Given the DocuTech context, one could believe the expected large-scale software deployment (and the resulting commercial success) we outlined. It worked...
When I met Anne Mulcahy a few years later, I told her that she had saved XMPie. How come, she wondered? I answered that saving Xerox kept the iGen story alive and indirectly helped build and maintain investors' confidence regarding XMPie's commercial outlook.
I hope that Xerox will find ways to take a good hard look at what it has and where its unique core strengths are, divest what's not needed, and expand and grow by leveraging its strengths and assets and not by abandoning the past and jumping into promising new green fields.
- Discussion is closed -