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This week at Interop was a blur between panels, press events, seminars, the demo room, 1:1’s with resellers and dinners. All went very well for me, but perhaps the most memorable moments were celebrating Anne Mulcahy’s induction into CRN’s Industry Hall of Fame…and I have pictures to prove it! That’s me, standing right next to Anne in the photo. She accepted the honor with her usual humility and grace and we were all proud to be a part of her moment. As long as Anne is CEO , I am confident that " Partner or Perish " will be our cultural mantra not a catchy slogan or a cliche! Enjoy the photos!
Gary Gillam
Vice President, North American Channel Operations
Xerox
I just returned from one of our largest Security Summits at the NYSE. We hosted over 120 customers and we discussed security risk facing the enterprise today. We answered questions about data security, cyber crime, the inside and outside threats, protecting trade secrets and enforcing policies. After doing nine (now ten) of these Summits throughout North America it’s heartening to see so many corporate executives taking information security more seriously and making an effort to become more strategic in their approach to enterprise security because this is the mandate of our times. Larry Greenemeier does a great job of capturing some key points from the Summit over on Information Week.
Designing security, rolling it out, and managing it on an ongoing basis is no small challenge and no one is really capable of doing it alone. The stakes are just too high. We all need to be smarter about security: corporate security, national security, and personal security. We take it seriously at Xerox because today’s document traverses the paper and digital worlds and is subjected to unprecedented risk. Our goal is to reduce that risk by helping our customers build a “chain-of-custody” around the document throughout its lifecycle. For these reasons, we will continue to foster the public dialog and exchange of ideas in forums like the Security Summit. Two more are on the drawing board at this time. For those that can't attend in person, we recorded this one and it will be available as a podcast next week. Stay tuned…
David Drab
Principal, Information Content Security Services
Xerox Global Services
 For the past 11 years, CRN has recognized true pioneers of the high-tech industry with its annual Hall of Fame event, a tradition the high-tech channel news organization started in partnership with the Computer History Museum. Our 2007 inductees, being recognized in a ceremony today in Las Vegas, are notable for bringing fresh thinking and energy to their companies—flying in the face of conventional wisdom. Certainly Xerox Chairman and CEO Anne Mulcahy exemplifies that.
Mulcahy's story has become legend throughout the industry. Since taking the top post at Xerox in 2001, she has engineered a dramatic turnaround, appealing to the twin weapons of improved product quality (especially in color printing) and strategic business consulting. What makes her achievement all the more compelling is that she led this turnaround from within, drawing on the hearts and minds of Xerox managers she has now worked alongside for more than 30 years. It's no small feat to change the thinking of an entire organization, let alone one the size of Xerox.
CRN is honored to welcome Ms. Mulcahy to the Hall of Fame, joining the ranks of Microsoft's Bill Gates, Intel's Andrew Grove and a fellow female pioneer in the high-tech executive suite, Autodesk's Carol Bartz. We recognize Ms. Mulcahy not only for what she has already accomplished, but for the ongoing legacy she promises to establish at Xerox— and for the example she continues to set for a future generation of business leaders.
Heather Clancy
Vice President/Editor, CRN
Mulcahy's Introductory Video
Anne Mulcahy's Acceptance Remarks
When it comes to IT, managed services can be a lucrative business—enriching product margins and creating recurring revenue streams. But, as I discovered yesterday during my Managed Services 2.0 Panel at Interop, many solution providers are still considering the best way to enter and navigate the managed services space. CRN designed the panel moderated by Editor Heather Clancy to explore options for solutions providers in a more intimate setting, and we talked about everything from staffing to contact and service level concerns to technology segments. Here are my key takeaways…
Understand your customers. As agreed by all it begins by developing an understanding of the customer's processes. That's when things gets interesting. That's when you start looking at ways to improve their efficiencies, improve their productivity, lower their costs. So what does it take? It takes a commitment from a resources perspective. You need knowledgeable people, and lots of them, to be able to work with and consult with customers. Does it make more sense for them to have Xerox run their high-end printing equipment in their copy center, or not? Would they save more money by having Xerox run their mailroom so they can devote those resources to core functions?
Remember it’s transitional. And it's transitional because of technology advances and market shifts. For example, it's not uncommon for Xerox to counsel a customer to actually *reduce* the number of printing devices it has. That's because, often we find that not only do companies sometimes have more printing devices than they actually need, but that they could save more money and actually be more productive with fewer, yet more advanced/sophisticated devices. That's a big transition for companies like Xerox. But it's the right thing to do for the customer. The proliferation of printer centric MFP's such as the new 8560 allow you to consolidate less efficient single function network mono printers and capture the annuity through Xerox's Page Pack cost per print supplies renewal program .
Keep it seamless. In a perfect world, the managed service is seamless to the customer. Transparent. We have lots of customers who think the Xerox people on their floor are actually their own employees. And that's the way it should be. Uninterrupted and seamlessly doing their work and leaving the customer to its core competency.
Software is at your service. From management to workflow, software is enabling our managed services people to offer greater flexibility and service to customers. Our Xerox Office Services suite of device management software, for example, can not only prevent printer downtime by troubleshooting and resolving problems before they happen, but can also tell customers which devices are getting used more than others. With that insight, machines in slow traffic areas can be moved to busier departments, or taken offline. This is what we call asset management, and it's done thru software that can be managed by the customer or by Xerox services people on-site or remotely.
For those of you still unsure, Larry Walsh has a great post from April 11 outlining “Three Paths to Managed Services.” Feel free to share your own thoughts on the benefits and challenges of MS. I’ll be back with more thoughts from Interop after a tour of the show floor and the CRN Hall of Fame Channel Industry Event.
Gary Gillam
Vice President, North American Channel Operations
Xerox
In talking with customers recently, I found it interesting what kinds of things drive their decision making around printers and mfp's. We, in the industry, are guilty of focusing on a few specs or a few details that probably get too much attention at the expense of things that really make a difference to the users through the life of the product with the customer. Therefore, we have trained our customers to make decisions based on those specs.
I couldn't help but think of the analogy of when we pick our life partners. There are specs that are very easy to comprehend: height, weight, hair color, maybe even speed...but these do not tell us much about what it is going to be like to live with that person. I see the same thing with printers and mfps. Those specs are there, but most of the time, they are not the important ones that tell us what it is going to be like living in the office with the product. How many interventions, how easy it is to use, how reliable, how much can I use it to do things my way vs. how much do I have to change to do it the machine's way. Many of the attributes that make a product nice and productive to "live with" are not in the specs used to make the decision, nor are they often times even found in a trial.
I encourage people, when buying products, to get beyond the typical specs and think about what the real work that needs to be done and how the product will fit into their environment. It is going to be part of your workplace for a while. How easy will it, in fact, be to live with?
Dave Bates
Vice President, Product Marketing
Xerox Office Group
In the automotive industry, quality control is one of the most critical aspects of customer satisfaction. Fall behind the leaders in this category, and your market share is sure to follow. But what about maintaining this control over information that is used in the everyday operations of the company?
One of the fastest ways to close a competitive advantage gap is to hire away an expert. But what if the expert brings documents that are clearly the intellectual property of his former employer?
That’s the quandary Hyundai Motors finds itself in after hiring former Toyota quality control officer Bruce Shibuya. According to whistle-blowers inside Hyundai, Shibuya brought with him an impressive collection of Toyota quality-control documentation. And for three years, he used these documents to brief his Hyundai quality-control team.
Over at Boeing, they have been reeling since the revelations in 2003 that it used stolen trade secrets to beat rival Lockheed Martin to a US rocket contract, and that it recruited a senior government official when she was in charge of allocating multi-billion-dollar contracts for the US Air Force. For those indiscretions they face Department of Justice fines up to $500 million.
These two cases illustrate the importance of building a culture that takes information security and corporate ethics seriously. For one thing, internal documents flow more readily these days. E-mail and information storage technologies such as flash drives make it easier for proprietary information to walk out the front door. And what about the ethical implications? Clearly, there were enough people in high levels who knew they were gaining an unfair advantage, but said and did nothing for years.
The financial cost, the ruined careers, the damaged corporate image are all consequences too great to risk. Without buy-in and commitment from the top to the bottom of the organization, and continual review and reinforcement, security and ethics policies are just words on paper. When no one drives security, the organization may very well be on a road to nowhere.
David Drab
Principal, Information Content Security Services
Xerox Global Services
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