Roy:
Traditionally, convergence as we use it without any qualifiers or pre-fixers,
relates to this huge bandwidth convergence–voice, data and video. So what we
will do is, we will take up these three or four different trends and try and
understand where we are. There has been the convergence of applications in
end-user devices which have again happened for very long time. What are your key
initiatives in this area?
Bhatnagar:
There are two aspects we would like to talk about. One is the fact that HP has
recognized the need to get into this convergence business. We have spun-off a
separate division called the Personal Systems Appliances Division now. Its only
responsibility is to look at convergence technologies and how they could impact
various business forms.
Within our organization we are
more focused on imaging solutions. So more and more solutions revolving around
such products will be emerging from HP. We have stopped looking at products per
se and are moving towards solutions.
One of the reasons why
convergence is really taking shape is also because customers have realized the
need to build solutions which do not involve PCs.
Duggan:
The interest in converging technologies is really being driven by vendors and
the media, not necessarily by the consumers. If we talk to our consumers, there
are two distinct types of customers. The first customer is a network customer,
who is an IT user. The second customer is a home or SOHO type of customer, who
really has a different set of needs. For the SOHO market, we recognize the
ability to have one footprint. Also the fax-photocopy-print feature is a
convenience. It is not necessarily a cost-effective convenience for the
marketplace.
We think that there will be a
demand for convergence technology–scanning, photocopying and printing. It will
be so, as all our products support the legacy of a strong networking background.
At the same time, we will also offer manageability for the function that makes
up a MFD. In a laser printer, at the time of purchase or at a later time, you
will be able to upgrade it for scanning, photo-copying and faxing. So that is a
part of our launch we are about to do around the country.
What is Xerox’s take on this
whole area for these various applications coming together? Initially, did you
stand in the consumer, the corporate, the low or the middle scale printing
arena?
Chatterjee:
The point of view of Xerox is fully built around the market shift that has
occurred. What Xerox started noticing with research was that there is a major
shift occurring in the way people were using documents. So, what we saw was that
from 1990 to 2001 there would be a mega shift. In the sense, if there is a
volume shift that is occurring approximately about 9 to 10 times, along with
that, the usage of documents is also changing. For example, the paper document
in 1990 was around 9% the cake size, which is shifting to approximately 30% of
the cake size by 2001. Now that is a major shift.
Xerox felt that if the documents
are turning digital where are they moving? We felt that most of it is coming
closer to the network. So we thought the entire crowd of documents is going to
happen in the network. And we felt that if we really had to work around
strategy, it must happen at convenience in the work group level. If we must
work, it must be at the work group level.
The shift is occurring and
thereby one has to come up with solutions in two areas. One, around color and
the other black and white. Technologically, both may look alike, but the volumes
in each area were completely different. Color is an upcoming market. But in
black and white it was fairly high in terms of volume. For example, if you look
at India, the net print volume or page volume is approximately 189 billion pages
whereas the copying part was just about only 15%-16% of that, which is nothing.
The shift is taking place in printing. We were asking ourselves, what will
happen to the entire digital document and how is it going to be handled?
We came up with a few MFDs which
we call Document Centers, capable of faxing, scanning, copying and printing. But
more than that, what Xerox did come up with, were solutions which would be post
scanning.
Currently, apart from all this,
Xerox also has lot of work on color. In terms of not only work group and
convenience, but also high end color, at the publishing level. At the same time,
it will give RGB (Red, Green, Blue) and CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black)
affinity. Now that has been the focus of Xerox on the net.
Thadani:
I would like to give a different dimension to this entire convergence
technology. At least in this region that we are operating, there are three key
area drivers for every kind of IT business–the first is the internet, the
second and most important driver is the boom in the PCs and the third is the
emergence of the homes, or the consumer segment which has been growing strongly
in the APAC region and also all around the world.
Canon is working on developing
devices which can inter-operationally work with PCs as well as digital TVs. It
is an important arena if you talk of the input. Where you have PCs and TVs,
there is a convergence of these happening.
In another two or three months,
we will introduce a printer which can actually talk to a television, print
internet images and download it from a TV on to a printer. Canon has also
pioneered to make scanning enabled inkjet printers.
Further, Canon is also making
internet printers. This means that, like you plug in your PC on to the modem to
browse the net, you can access the printers. Even if you do not have printers in
your home, if there are certain copy stations in your locality you can give them
the internet address of these printers and straight away print them over there.
So such devices are also available.
To take up user issues, how
much of it is driven by user need for vendor technology? Let me ask the users,
what gaps are there in this area, in what is available and what you need?
Narayanan:
What vendors tried to integrate together into a product (MFD) was an older
version of all existing technology available in the marketplace. For SOHO, space
considerations are the main aspects that do the job. But what happens if in a
SOHO environment, a printer snaps and all the functions associated with it are
also not available? And printing is one of the things. Choking of the network is
mainly because of printer traffic.
Duggan: The speed of the
device is not an issue. But the bandwidth impact of the print job, how it is
packaged and switched are the issues. Actually, it is more than the speed of the
device, it is the bandwidth.
Chatterjee:I guess it is
really not the crowd or the volume of the documents that is flowing on the
network. It also has to do with the devices. One of the key things that one has
seen in any of the network devices today is device contention. The device itself
should have the capability to manage this contention. That means it should be
able to address multiple requests put up by various work stations and received
by the printer.
What are some of the printing
issues in the enterprise environment?
Tomar:
First of all, let me introduce my own network which is of a complex nature. We
are a rural sector-based organization, starting from Krishi Vigyan Kendras to
agricultural, engineering and veterinary colleges, agricultural universities,
ICAR institutes, zonal research stations and regional stations to our
headquarters. So we are linked from the farmer to the professionals and in our
network, the interface we have presently is Win NT. We also have Linux network
operating systems. We have 832 locations throughout the country. But till today,
we have established only 449 cells. We are having more than 100 DMA VSATs, about
3,000 computers through out the NARC agricultural research system and since we
are supposed to serve the farmers, we need printers that are cheap and LAN
compatible.
Throughout NARC we have large
number of laser, dot matrix and inkjet printers, our intention is to get MFPs.
Second, we want a compact unit. We have more than 300 laser printers and have
given specifications for a compact unit and a LAN-compatible printer. The
vendors have given a network adapter and laser unit. That is an additional unit.
And this is giving trouble to us, because in our rural area Krishi Vigyan
Kendras, the people do not know how to match, detach or even plug it.
Speed is important as we are not
able to support more than one printer in our Krishi Vigyan Kendras. We are
giving a few nodes and they are also purchasing their own nodes, so that users
may be 10 to 20 in one Krishi Vigyan Kendra, around one hundred in one college,
and maybe more than thousand in one deemed university. In that situation, a
network compatible printer with speed matters.
Even the convergence of a printer
should have compatibility with the local TV, with any web site that can be
printed, and the facility for fax or fax-email. We require the toner to be
refilled and refused because investing Rs3,000 to Rs4,000 per toner is costly.
We need color printing in all the areas. But it is costly. Though inkjet can
give color, we want laser with color and low cost.
What do you think, are major
user demands or synergy demands between what is happening and the demands from
the user side?
Narayanan: Now
with networks and various options available, distribution has grown 100 folds
and print needs, 10 folds.
Especially when we come to the A0
level, copying, printing and large drawings at our sites, cycle time reduction
is a key issue. Drawings to be sent through VSATs require modification and both
a plotter and copier. If one has to invest in an A0 copier and plotter, it is an
uneconomical solution. MFDs break downs become a problem. Serviceability,
support and ruggedness are three major concerns with MFDs.
As far as color goes, cost of
color can be considered as an extremely uncharitable user category. What are
vendors’ comments on this?
Thadani: Specifically
with color printing, there are a few things that Canon has done. What we have
done is in our low-end printers, we give more ink per cartridge. For those who
want to print more in color, cost per page actually comes down. We have done
another modification by making the entire printer cartridge comprise of mono and
color components. The heads and ink tanks have been made separate. So now you
have ink tanks which can be replaced. After seven, eight or nine times of usage
of the same head, you can go for a replacement of heads.
We have come out with printers
that have got individual ink tanks for cyan, magenta, yellow and black. So at
any point in time, if your ink gets exhausted you only change that individual
color tank. This has contributed to economic color printing.
What is Xerox’s take on this
enterprise color printing?
Chatterjee: The
considerations put up by Narayanan and Tomar basically constitute perception of
vendors. Vendors should be looking at high quality performance, reliability and
at the same time a lower price.
What we have done at the basic
manufacturing level itself, is in principle we decided to make every component a
customer replaceable unit. It cannot be one component the way you looked at it
earlier. One cartridge will have all CMYK and that will not be the ink
cartridge. We have decided that everything must be customer replaceable,
depending on usage, including even certain removable spare parts.
Can you give a perspective on
high-end and digital printing area, things like print-on-demand?
Chatterjee: Print-on-demand
is picking up fairly high although acceleration has not happened. It is
happening now. Our key understanding in India itself, while talking to a
publisher, was that the inventory cost itself is Rs15 crore on the goods that he
carries, which do not get sold for years together. Now people have started
viewing these as critical factors. And at the end of the day when we look at
concepts such as print-on-demand or internet printing, the basic cost to the
customer is slightly higher than off-set printing. But there are clearly
disadvantages which the customers are going to see, which gets adjusted, with
regard to the cost of printing.
In lasers, work group and cost
of color laser printing do not seem to have gone down dramatically. Your
comments:
Bhatnagar: I
would disagree to that. Broadly, you have to look at it in two perspectives.
One, the market of the particular product you are addressing and two, the need
of the customer in that market segment. Inkjets were never meant to address a
corporate segment. In the first place, it was positioned for the SOHO and home
users. It is a user profile, which requires a low initial investment and is okay
with the low cost of equipment purchase.
While consumables could be on the
higher side in terms of cost. Not withstanding that, if you look at the laser
segment, they were designed keeping a corporate in mind. When we talked of
DeskJet getting into the corporate segment, it is only because customers in
India look at the initial cost of purchase. So do corporates here. But if you
look at trends in the US and Europe, corporate purchase is limited to lasers.
Technology does not get accepted unless it is at the right price. In fact, there
has been a drop of 25%-30% in price. But the perception is that the cost has not
come down.
Chatterjee: In
India also we harbor a myth that our cost of printing is high. In fact our cost
of printing is the cheapest in the world. Comparatively, in the international
price of producing print, we are less by 1/5th, even if you compare it with the
South American countries.
How important is the cost of
color and where is Lexmark headed in the color arena?
Duggan: Color
from a network perspective has to fit within that total cost of ownership (TCO)
scenario. So your acquisition cost, the operational cost and the management cost
of color lasers are the three big issues that in some ways retard color laser
technology in the corporate.
When we researched the market,
the things delaying the use of color in the organization is the acquisition cost
and the operation cost. The management cost is addressed because of the tools
and solutions we build around the products. But for those two things, color will
be the big change that we will see in the next three to five years. It will come
down in its acquisition cost and in operation cost.
MFDs, have been an area of a
fair amount of interest over a long period of time. There are a variety of MFDs
one might be using. If you were to buy an MFD, what is the key thing you will
look forward to in it or ask vendors to improve in it?
Narayanan: Reliability
of the basic device and independence of various functionalities built into a
single compact unit.
Tomar: We
want more user-friendly devices. We do not want sophisticated machines which
cannot be used by our users, starting from farmers to professionals. And second,
all after-sales service and spare parts should be available.
Narayanan:
PC-less printing. Normally, we look at a printer as a part of a PC, that is
going to send output. It should be something independent.
Given the user needs, how do
vendors see and address it?
Thadani: Canon
has two broad kinds of devices–pre-configured and configurable. When I say
pre-configured devices, you have in the laser and inkjet arena the four-in-ones
and six-in-ones with printing, copying, scanning, faxing and telephone sets
attached to it.
Configurable is for the
corporate. You have a laser engine, and if you want to do more than laser
printing, you have a modular device on top, which makes it a scanner. Within
that laser, you have the color and mono laser engine. Using this scanning and
printing device, you can do copying. If you have a request for faxing, put in a
fax card and it becomes a fax machine as well. Then you have connectivity on the
network in an office environment LAN, or connectivity over the internet that is
configurable. Depending on what the corporate users need, the modular devices
can be fitted on top of a basic printing engine. That is our view of MFD now.
Chatterjee: Xerox
started these devices long time back, devices called Document Centers. The
perception that MFDs are unreliable has evolved from small MFDs–the inkjet,
which keeps getting overloaded. But MFDs in the true sense, is a brand new
technology on the workgroup.
One of the fundamental things
that has undergone a change is the number of working components in MFDs. For
example, earlier, if you looked at a photocopier, you had something like 3,000
components or moving parts. They have been reduced to something like 300 and
have been modulared in such a way that they have become customer replaceable
units. So a drastic change has occurred.
Is the focus on corporate or
consumer MFDs?
Bhatnagar: HP’s
focus on MFDs is not in the consumer side right now. The current perspective
that we have is that network printing is going to be the key focus for us. If
you look at the convergence of technologies, majority of the growth has happened
in the work group printing arena. It is not really instances where the customer
wants to scan email and fax in a common platform. It is where the customer wants
ease of use and more cost-effective means of printing.
That is the biggest growth segment for us and the perspective we carry on
convergence. The future lies in a single statement–any technology which talks
of a convergence will have to obviate the need for a PC.
Duggan: Like
HP we are taking the future in a similar manner. The statistics we see globally
indicate a rapid decline in photocopying in the organization. That faxing is
declining. That people are migrating documents in an electronic format.
There is a role for an MFD in a
corporate cell but I think it is like a photocopier, a device available to the
user but not fundamental to the business. The fundamental aspect to their
business is the presentation of their work. Whether, it is multi-application,
duplex, printed, deleted, commented on and translated on, it is using
technology. It is building solutions around technology and not building just a
device. That is very much something we are working on.
Krishna Kumar: What
is the next big technology we are going to see?
Duggan: Color.
We will see radical changes in color and how it is networkable color, its
convenience, its operation cost. How to make it more manageable, more
affordable. And how to integrate it into what our customers are doing.
Bhatnagar: Opportunities
lie in a vast frame in terms of customers. The inkjet is going to take a leap
into how good a color printout you can take from an inkjet printer, with
FotoRed3 coming in another 2-3 months’ time on high-end.
Thadni: The
key trend is affordable color and print quality exceeding conventional silver
halide. We have already introduced such products where printouts are better than
silver halide pictures. Speeds of 2,400 dots per inch, best print quality and
reducing droplet sizes to make sharper outlets. Most vendors are only into the
business of making and selling printers. We are trying to make printers that are
not dependent on PCs. Shortly, we will launch living room printers, connected to
digital televisions.
Chatterjee: Color
is one of the key areas. Not only color quality but color management is also
becoming critical. Definitely, MFD-related software and document management
system’s are one key area. Whether MFDs or printers, documents are going to be
in paper and digital. There is gong to be a change in cake size but documents
will remain as most of the work revolves around documents. So one is likely to
witness MFDs and document-related systems, color and color management systems.
–A DQ Report