Xerox till date has only been associated with copying. However, Vipin Tuteja, executive-director, marketing, business support and international business, Xerox India, wants to dispel that image. ?You will find us getting into a lot of different things which you probably would never thought of Xerox playing a role in,? he says. From biomedical to cloud computing, Xerox India is looking to put its fingers in multiple pies in the coming months. In an interview with FE?s Chanpreet Khurana, he talks about changes within the organisation and the new innovation centre at Chennai. Edited excerpts:
Could you elaborate on how Xerox India?s go-to-market strategy has altered in the post-financial crisis era?
Till the end of last year, we were focused as an organisation on three business groups?office, production and Xerox Global Services. What that led to was more of a product-based approach into the marketplace. The customers had moved away from looking at products to looking out for a complete end-to-end solution. And that required synergies between all the three business groups.
What we have now done is instead of the three business groups, we have two sales organisations: one which is focusing on three key verticals of telecom, banking and insurance, and within that the top accounts and approaching them with a complete enterprise-led approach?they are going and assessing their complete documentation need, and are studying how their document flows from one place to another. The other part of the sales organisation looks after the rest of the large corporates and then the small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
What kind of organisational shifts did you have to make for this transition from three product lines to two services segments?
There is an obvious change in the portfolio (of Xerox employees). But what that brings in is the training, and the right level of skills required. When people are going with a solutions approach, those people have to be trained to be able to articulate those solutions, to be able to design that solution. And what that also requires is an investment into the pre-sales implementation and execution team. So there are the sales people that go and articulate the solution and then there are pre-sales people that actually go and do the assessments. Also, what it required was that everybody would now be able to sell all three lines of products, their knowledge needed to be enhanced.
When did you start making this shift?
It is something we started working on 12 months back. And it took us about that much time to implement it with effect from January 1 this year. A lot of back work went into it for the people to be ready to take on these roles.
The Xerox innovation centre at Chennai was just inaugurated in March. What is the focus of the centre here?
We have just started our fifth innovation centre in Chennai. We have started working on the solutions for the end customers over here. This is being done along with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras. There are a couple of solutions we are working on with them on cloud computing as well as some of the technological solutions for SMEs. Not the product innovation as of now, but it is more the services solutions.
We have right now five people working. This (project) is something which is going to get wrapped up. These people are more from the technology background than business. As far as the outlay for the centre is concerned, it is too early for us to start commenting on these figures.
What is Xerox doing in the cloud computing space?
I can?t really comment what it would be. But this is something we have started working on with IIT Madras. This is to do with the document management services.
What do we see coming out of Xerox India in the second half? Do we see something coming out of Chennai soon?
I don?t think we?ll see anything coming out of Chennai by the end of this year. But there are new product offerings. In August, we will be doing those launches and they are significant products which will help in the reduction of running cost because how we position our product is the total cost of ownership rather than just the initial price.
We have a new product we will be launching on solid ink technology, which would help us not just cut costs but will also help conserve the environment.
How is the ACS Business Process Outsourcing acquisition adding to Xerox?s business?
This is a very recent acquisition. We do see a lot of synergies. At the corporate level, we are going very strong on the services-led business. ACS does have expertise in transportation and human resources, in outsourcing. Those are the areas where we would be looking at how we could work together.
What is the market looking like for Xerox in India?
One part of it is the printing business, and the other part is the services business. If you look at the printing business, the overall print market is growing by about 12% year-on-year. The digital printing within that is growing at about 25%, which is where we see ourselves as the market leaders.
The other side is when you look at the services business. Here the opportunity is just too huge.
What are some of the other growth areas the company is investing in?
Digital photo printing is one part of digital printing which is now going to grow significantly. I am looking at growth doubling this year compared with last year. It is not very huge in India right now, but given the population and given the application, this has a great opportunity. If you look at what has been happening in the American and the European marketplace, and with the growing sales of digital cameras, this is a business which will grow. We are making huge investments here and we just launched another big digital press that is specialised for digital photo printing.
One of the main things growing in digital printing is the books that are being printed now on digital. There are a lot of people who would want to get their books published but the offset technology did not bring them the economics of printing fewer books. With the help of digital printing, you can print even one book, and the cost (per book) does not change whether you are printing one or 500 books. In the publishing side, they found that they almost could print a run length of 1,200 books at the same cost on digital.
Digital printing has always been used in transactional sort of printing. For example, all your bank statements, credit card statements and mobile bills are printed on digital because they have variable data. Each sheet printed has personalised information.
The global Xerox chief technology officer in a recent interview said the company is exploring opportunities in areas as diverse as linguistics and biomedical. These are not typically segments Xerox has been associated with.
Xerox till date has only been associated with copying, and today we are much more than just copying. We are playing a part in the movement and capturing of content. You will find us getting into a lot of different things which you probably would never thought of Xerox playing a role in.