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 Last week I got a new mobile device and with one more step towards complete information mobility I realized that as much as I value the ability to be connected anywhere, I also rely more and more on infrastructure “outposts”. As it turns out, getting hardcopy or scanning a document is fundamental to my everyday work and the MFP is a key piece of technology I rely on.
The new Xerox Extensible Interface Platform lets me access the MFP in any office and get access to my personalized applications. I can collect print jobs at a convenient MFP and scan documents directly to my inbox without fiddling with email addresses. In short, the MFP becomes my mobile outpost in an otherwise virtualized and almost invisible computing and communications infrastructure.
As both a technology provider and an office worker, I share the day to day experience that our customers are facing; increased mobility with reliance on simple and reliable IT infrastructure. Many of our customers in the legal market face challenges every day serving the document intensive needs of mobile attorneys. With Xerox EIP, Equitrac is able to deliver solutions for secure and convenient access to these devices while providing cost recovery features right at the front panel of the Xerox MFP. Law firms get more done with less hassle, Help Desk calls are diminished, and business processes like cost recovery are simplified.
With Xerox EIP, all the cool technology I need is wrapped up in a nice package wherever I need it; Outpost MFP!
Chris Wyszkowski
VP of Product Marketing and Management
Equitrac--A Xerox Business Partner
 As I'm leaving the show this morning I am reflecting on what I saw and heard. On the very positive side the Xerox booth was packed from beginning to end. Our booth looked strong, underscoring the many positive things that are happening at Xerox. Most industry people (partners, analysts, press, etc.) greeted me with questions about the Global Imaging announcement and what a great move that was. From an Office viewpoint, Global Imaging and EIP were the hot topics and gave Xerox some swagger at the show.
People are really starting to get the idea that an MFP is an important part of your IT network, not a peripheral. I still think we use too many words that scare customers (and sales people) like "solutions" and "workflow" instead of simply explain how much more powerful the new MFP's are for all the things you. I think we made progress at the show, the demonstrations were understandable, the value seemed clear (even to non-technical people like me) so it serves as a template for how to proceed.
On the negative side, it seems like the industry could work on getting a little greener. I saw very little evidence that anyone cared, us included--even with recent announcements, we could do more. We can't go on like this forever.
Dave Bates
Vice President, Product Marketing
Xerox Office Group
CRN just ran a follow-up piece on Xerox's agreement to acquire Global Imaging Systems. Xerox's recent distribution moves reflect our strategy to expand our reach and better serve SMB customers. And it's good to see we have everyone's attention. But I do want to clarify a couple of points in the story...
First, we are very excited about the value proposition Global Imaging Systems brings to its 200,000 customers as shown in our recent acquisition announcement. These long-standing relationships speak to the strength of the Global value proposition and we expect them to continue to grow. At the same time, we see opportunities for reseller partners to expand their relationship with Xerox as well. We are pursuing multiple routes to market to ensure the power of Xerox brand is within reach to more SMB customers than ever before. It is a huge market, Xerox has great offerings, and we are an under distributed brand. As a result, there will be significant business opportunities for Xerox, Global Imaging Systems, agents and reseller partners.
Jim Firestone
President
Xerox North America
We had a cool event yesterday evening at this year's AIIM / On Demand . It actually consisted of two events: one at Fenway Park in Boston, the other in the virtual world of Second Life . It was an unprecedented announcement of 15 new Xerox products and solutions. At the Xerox pavilion in Second Life, I demonstrated the Extensible Interface Platform for our office products, and the new Nuvera Emulsion Aggregation toners. A few analysts joined me and explored the virtual worlds for the first time. It worked OK, except that the streaming video feed didn't cooperate with us, but of course these are the challenges of being an early adopter of new technology.
Virtual worlds enable Xerox scientists around the world to collaborate and interact with customers. With virtual 3D visualization of new ideas, our innovators can dream with customers. Together they can design even better products and services. Also many thanks to DJ Waki for coming to our Second Life panel, and for sharing my enthusiasm for virtual worlds!
Sophie Vandebroek
CTO
Xerox
I spent about an hour yesterday catching up with colleagues in the Xerox booth and then started my journey around the show floor. I have not been to AIIM/On Demand in 4 years and my first impression was that the big vendors were about the same in number, but there seemed to be a lot less peripheral vendors and they were mostly software providers vs traditional printing supplies and substrate providers. Had a great conversation on progress of personalization with Chad at Metavante and he said their business was doing well.
Had a meeting with Charlie Corr, David Pesko and Alison Hipp from InfoTrends about market trends in the production space and outsourcing in particular. Made me feel good about the direction we are moving toward, but nervous about the pace of change as customer expectations are rising every day. Ran into some former Xerox employees in HP's booth. Talented people which made me realize they are getting years of industry knowledge in large blocks so we better step up our game.
It was a long day, but a productive one. I'm heading back to Rochester as business requirements call.
Derrick Doi
Vice President Market Development
Xerox Global Services
As I head out to Boston for the AIIM / On Demand show, my thoughts go back 13 years to when I participated in the first Xerox visit to the AIIM show. Come to think of it, that is probably because I still have the black and yellow “show shirt” hanging in my closet – despite regular and frequent protests and threats from my wife to get rid of it.
In 1994, Xerox set up a major event at the Jacob K. Javits Center that coincided with the AIIM show. Javits was so large that it swallowed both events and without collisions, though it made it easier for the press to cover both events. The Xerox event, code named Typhoon, was to announce a new solutions strategy, moving from feeds and speeds to vertically integrated solutions featuring Xerox hardware and software aligned by industry segment. The seven solutions areas were entered through a dark tunnel dramatically enhanced by smoke and flashing lights. The evening before the show opened, the executive in charge of the show gathered all his Xerox folks together in the dramatic center of the booth for a final pep talk and to share his vision. It was clear to me that half of the people present probably had no idea what he was talking about.
But tucked away on the side of a “future technology” exhibit was a small, innocuous unmarked console printer which would periodically spit out full color documents at 40 ppm. And standing beside it, we were showing matched Xerographic and offset prints and asking the customers if they could tell them apart. We were showing about 20 different technologies in the “future suite,” but the big take away was that toner-based color, which was then available only in copiers and for office documents, was a viable printing technology for these analysts and lead customers.
As to the success of the solutions thrust on this event, well all I can say is that one of the advantages of being ahead of the pack is that you can get a few tries before the pack catches up. You can see from Tom Wetjen’s blog entry of April 9 that Xerox will be emphasizing “show me,” demonstrating real applications – what I think we were trying to do in 1994. And this time, all the Xerox people in the booth get it. I believe the past is a good guide to the future – it is just hard to find the clues in the clutter. So I will try to keep an open mind as I go around the show, looking for something that could become as big as our production color probe of 1994.
Just to add another walk down memory lane to this year’s event, the Xerox booth is number 914 – the model number of our first office copier and one of the most disruptive and significant products of the last century. Talk about setting expectations!
Peter Crean
Senior Fellow, Xerox Innovation Group
Xerox
As a pre-sales technical contact, the benefits of integrating into a platform like EIP are immense. EIP is an extremely open platform that gives us, in terms of being a development house, more control and thereby delivering the end user a more intuitive and rich experience at the panel of a Xerox device. The open calls allow us to control authentication and provide customization of the look and feel of the panel. We will be able to have custom forms on the panel of the device that directly integrate with standard scanning applications like being able to browse to folder and send to email. In addition we will be able to browse out to back-end applications, including DocuShare, right from the panel of the device giving the end user dynamic control over where they will be sending documents.
Additionally, since EIP is a web services based platform we will be able to have users identified uniquely by their credentials rather than just generically authenticating them as a user. What this means is that users can log in anywhere on a network of devices and see only the menus and forms that are assigned to them. This provides a tremendous level of personalization and is only possible through a robust and open platform like EIP. While it gives us more control over the look and feel it also provides us the ability to streamline management and administration of the system. Devices now can simply point to a web connector and rather than having to set a host of preferences on each individual device.
James Fischer
Senior Sales Engineer
Notable Solutions, Inc.--A Xerox Business Partner
As I prepare to attend AIIM/On Demand this year, first of all, I'm hoping the weather doesn't prevent me from getting there!
As long as I do get there, I am interested in seeing where the industry has progressed to in the area of personalized communications. I still recall attending Xplor in 1996 in snowy Minneapolis and listening to Martha Rogers talk about the power of personalization. Now 10+ years later, while there is a lot of name/address personalization, are the companies selling to me using advanced data mining techniques to appeal to me based on my buying behaviors or are they just happy to have my name spelled correctly? I'm looking forward to finding out how customers and vendors view progress in this area.
Derrick Doi
Vice President Market Development
Xerox Global Services
The buzz and excitement is building for the 2007 AIIM/OnDemand beginning next Tuesday. While I was getting my talk ready for my Wednesday Panel and preparing for some press interviews, I paused to reflect on the role this show has played in the history of the new Xerox. Thirty five years ago, I attended the National Microfilm Association – the forerunner of AIIM which now bills itself as the Enterprise Content & Information Management – show to test my concept for a direct laser-based computer-to-film recorder. That show was attended by prim and proper librarians and geeky archivists. Today AIIM is all about using, processing and sharing information, not about locking and preserving it. And there is exciting interplay between images and information. Some of the same companies are still there, but they are significantly evolved and the big booths are sponsored by the likes of Adobe and Microsoft.
On Demand is a product of the digital print age and was the child of Charlie Pesko. Charlie began his career at Xerox Square in the mid 70’s as one of the bright young tigers in Art Stauffer’s marketing group in Xerox Square about the time when digital was just beginning. In the wake of the DocuTech launch, he began On Demand to convince “regular printers” that digital was real, was the way to go, and that he (the show and his consulting firm) was there to help. Charlie and his sequence of consulting firms did a great deal to advance the digital print industry, as well as provide gainful employment to many former Xerox execs over the years On Demand has always been more of a series of tutorials than a regular trade show. Many of the speakers are lead users and early adopters. In the beginning, it was more about mind share than order taking, but this year Xerox is trying to balance that out.
Putting AIIM and OnDemand together seems very natural and convenient for Xerox. It plays to our two established businesses and the interplay of Technology, Document Management and Services can be seen across the show floor.
In my next blog, I will replay some stories from Xerox’s first big splash at AIIM in 1994 and how I am looking at this years show through that prism.
Peter Crean
Senior Fellow, Xerox Innovation Group
Xerox
E-discovery is the perfect fit for the Big I little t equation—new regulations are forcing companies to put the emphasis on information like never before. Essentially, this means knowing what information to store and how to find it. It means putting policies in place to govern the management of information, and enforcing them. Obviously technology is an important part of the equation as it can help automate, enforce and audit this process. At AIIM, we’ll surely see plenty of new strategies and technologies to help companies handle the impact litigation and regulatory requests can have on their information management framework.
I’m hosting a roundtable next Tuesday to discuss what is or should be important to businesses when it comes to being prepared to meet requirements for e-discovery. We’re bringing together a group of people that are passionate about tackling the challenges that lie ahead—some of them are lawyers, some are industry experts/analysts and some are press. For those of you who won’t be with us in Boston, I invite you to share your opinions on the questions below, as we’d love to start the conversation right here. • Are companies developing in-house e-discovery teams or are they outsourcing to experts/providers? What do you recommend?
• How do most companies search out and find e-discovery/litigation service providers? What key attributes help one provider stand out over another?
• The expansion of the e-discovery market means more options, cost and liability when it comes to technology. What motivates technology buying decisions?
• Attorney review of documents can be the most costly aspect of e-discovery. What technology or other tools are companies using to cut down these expenses?
• How do you best convince a company they need a document retention strategy? How do you help them enforce it? I appreciate the input. We’re podcasting the session, so check back for more next week.
Craig Freeman
Vice President, Xerox Litigation Services
Xerox Global Services
EIP has a lot of capabilities, offers lots of opportunities, and will open lots of doors for new business. There are many good things about the way the EIP team designed this platform, and what it enables companies like Equitrac to achieve. However, from my point of view, there is one single capability that will make all the difference and puts EIP head and shoulders above the competition.
And that single feature? Integrated authentication.
By integrating the authentication into the EIP platform, every EIP application can easily and quickly leverage the authentication capabilities of Xerox Secure Access (or Equitrac Office). Users can authenticate using an identification card or by typing their credentials on the front panel -- and EIP will make the login credentials, including the user's email address, automatically available to all the EIP applications on the device.
Say "hello" to single sign-on. Say "goodbye" to multiple logins to do scanning. Say "hello" to quick and simple device access. Say "goodbye" to generic applications. Say "hello" to a fully personalized experience at the WorkCentre.
It's a new world out there. Say "hello" to the greatest feature of the EIP platform!
Tom Haapanen
VP Product Planning & Technology
Equitrac Corporation — A Xerox Business Partner
The AIIM/On Demand show is just one week away and momentum is building here at Xerox for the only show that really touches every corner of our business—from information capture to printed delivery. Some of our partners have already been blogging about the way we interact with information using the EIP (Extensible Interface Platform) applications we’ll be showcasing at AIIM. It’s time the rest of us joined them.
Over the next few weeks folks from our Office, Services and Innovation groups will report in on what they are seeing from the AIIM side of the show—technologies and strategies in document and content management that are changing the way we work with information. Over on the In the Balance blog, we’ll share observations from the digital printing and graphic communications side of the show.
Whether your business is small or large, whether your passion is for information or the technology that helps manage and share it, whether you are going to be in Boston or not, we are looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the topics covered here.
If you are attending, l hope your experience at the show is rewarding and I look forward to seeing you there.
Jim Firestone
President
Xerox North America
What is flexibility? According to the dictionary it is: “characterized by a ready capability to adapt to new, different, or changing requirements.”
You will think, “What has this to do with the blog?”, well, if you ask me the Big ‘I’ is flexible and the little ‘t’ is not.
Technology is not flexible because it either works or it doesn’t. Deep within, technology can be only two things a 0 or a 1. Information on the other hand is flexible, because if it isn’t flexible it’s only a useless pile of data.
Our branch is responsible for making and keeping this information flexible. We are the ones that must keep this ever-increasing, information monster under control. With ScanFlowStore we make a Xerox-machine far more flexible. We’re not only making a flexible product, we are, as an organization, also flexible.
Flexibility in an organization doesn’t always depend on the core processes of your organization. Like the flexibility to your customers or the flexibility of your support center, those are processes that are, according to the customer supposed to be flexible.
The core of flexibility in an organization can be found in the most valuable resource, the employees. An organization can gain the most flexibility when the employees become inter-flexible and have the ability to share information amongst themselves by knowing, who has what information. With such flexibility the business to business communication will also become more efficient.
Flexibility is, for me, a magic word and if we all put effort into making IT flexible, our business and our customers will notice a positive effect.
Wouter Koelewijn
CEO
X-Solutions – A Xerox Strategic Partner
My last post focused on the importance of providing the right Information to customers in order to create a superior brand experience. Today, I’d like to add that some experiences can only be delivered by putting real-time dialogue on the top of the list of ways we communicate. And by real-time, I mean using new technology to interact with them immediately—in the form of customer feedback tools, blogs, Second Life, even viral marketing—to answer questions, discuss industry issues, solicit feedback (both good and bad), etc. Sure, there’s risk involved. But customers want a relationship, not a sale. They expect openness, honesty and transparency and it’s on us to find new ways to give it to them.
More on this in a podcast I recorded with the guys at Marketing.fm after my speech at THE Conference on Marketing two weeks ago.
Mike Mac Donald
President, Marketing Operations
Xerox
I just finished Thomas L. Friedman’s book, The World is Flat. At approximately 600 pages, it was quite the read. Mr. Friedman asserts that the world is getting so small, that it is essentially flat. With today’s electronic business networks, smaller companies can plug in and be on a level (or flat) playing field with larger, global companies. Mr. Friedman cites several examples of very small offshore firms winning bids and delivering on very large commitments. In an interview on NPR, he also suggested that Wal-Mart benefited from the flattening of the world by developing a worldwide merchandise delivery system that minimizes cost which fuels the Wal-Mart primary customer value proposition – low prices.
Having just finished the book, I am much more sensitized to this flatness notion and I start to recognize the pattern more often even in different contexts. I then begin to wonder, what about the office printing business … is it flat too?
Well, in one respect, no. Printing relies on paper, a somewhat durable item and it is hard to image a flatness associated with something that is tangible and sometimes very heavy.
But PRINTING itself is a “flat” business. Small firms can purchase a relatively inexpensive color printer, and using pre-designed professional templates in common office software, they can generate attractive and effective marketing brochures, customer coupons, business cards, invoices, etc. Not so long ago, they would have had to rely on professional services to design these items or purchase “cookie-cutter” documents and outsource the printing. To minimize costs, many companies only printed the “important” documents in such a fashion and relied on monochrome printers and copiers to print the majority of their work. While cost efficient, the smaller firms couldn’t leave the same impression as larger organizations.
The faster speeds and color quality of today’s networked color printers and multifunction devices enable any-size company to make a good, professional “big company” impression. At the same time, larger firms can utilize today’s lower-priced, higher speed color printers and multifunction devices to more efficiently produce customer materials, customizing material for individual customers while reducing costs and perhaps even driving their own customer value propositions.
In either scenario, the printing business plays a role in the flattening of the world as envisioned by Mr. Friedman.
Shell Haffner
Worldwide Solid Ink Product Manager
XOG Marketing
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