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"Convergence is happening because customers need to build solutions which do not involve PCs.”

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DQI Bureau
New Update

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?

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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