It was a busy couple of days with several hundred analysts coming in from all over the world. Like last year, the day started off with CEO Meg Whitman addressing the crowd. Meg told the crowd that HP has three focuses – cloud security, big data and mobility. Very exciting. But what about print? I’m very excited for HP’s turnaround and I’m amazed by some of the things HP does in other areas that I don’t follow. But at the end of the day, I cover the world of print and I would like to hear the CEO of one of the most dominant print companies in the world at least reference the part of the business that made HP what it is today.
The company is returning to health, as Whitman told listeners, and the debt is now gone. They’re more streamlined and while there has been a lot of progress, according to Whitman, there is still a lot of work to be done. “I feel good where we are on the turnaround journey.”
Last year, HP revamped their partner program with the intent to become “the very best technology partner on earth,” according to Whitman. She acknowledged that HP was not as easy to do business with as some of their competitors and she said HP will continue to work at this.
Later, Whitman told us about their increased investment in R&D – one of the things I love about today’s HP. Whitman said, “We are investing more in R&D than ever before. We are focusing on R&D.” Indeed, at a time when competitors are cutting R&D almost every quarter, HP is increasing this spend – something that should pay dividends down the road.
We then heard from Dion Weisler, the relatively new executive VP from Australia. I love random meaningful data points and figures and Weisler threw a lot of very interesting numbers at us.
• Mobile workers: over the last couple of years, the number of anytime, anywhere workers doubled from 15% to 30% of the workforce (I missed the period but I think it was over the last couple of years).
• BYOD printing: 72% of people bring at least one personal device to work.
• 36% of workers say they’d be willing to pay for or put money towards a mobile device if they can help choose it.
These points led to a discussion about how difficult it is to manage a BYOD environment from an IT perspective (think security among other things) and how “BYOD is a CIO nightmare.”
Later in the meeting, we heard from Steve Nigro about HP Graphic Arts initiatives, products and programs as well as about inkjet. All ink flows through Steve. The instant ink program is going pretty well, although it’s still early to get significant results.
I will say, I think this program is brilliant. If you don’t know what it is, essentially for a small monthly fee, HP will monitor your printer and make sure you never run out of ink. You receive a set number of “pages” each month that you can use for documents, photos, etc. If you exceed that number you can buy more. If you don’t use them the pages roll over to the next month.
It’s a small amount (starting at $2.99/month) and there’s no annual fee or monthly commitment. You can cancel anytime. Wouldn’t you rather pay a few bucks a month instead of getting smacked with a $34 cartridge every now and then? The cartridges are larger than the retail cartridges, meaning you will not need to replace them as often. HP also monitors your printer to make sure you have enough ink when you need it. No more running out at 11 PM when your kid is trying to print their homework for tomorrow.
Environmentally, it’s also great because HP makes sure to provide you with packaging to ship back the used cartridges, ensuring they don’t wind up in landfills and that they’re reused (and that they don’t wind up being refilled by someone else – yet another advantage to HP).
Furthermore, the cost per page for this program is really competitive and often much cheaper than comparable laser products.
Ink in the office suddenly accounts for 1/3 of HP inkjet ink shipments (business ink products launched in 2009). Programs like this are ideal for SOHO offices. While laser is often preferred by businesses, ink offers a number of tremendous advantages over that technology; it’s greener as it uses less energy, it’s quieter, smaller carbon footprint, etc.
Personally, I would like to see an approach like instant ink brought to the laser products for SMB. Not for A3, but I think HP could make it work very nicely for their A4 products and achieve the same benefits they’re seeing with the ink program.
Moving on to the other end of the spectrum to production printing with the Indigo products; HP has had quite a busy year with the launch of the Indigo 10000. Indeed, things are going great for HP in this area as they now have over 80 of these presses installed in 23 countries. HP has made a lot of noise in packaging and label printing.
75% of the press industry is still analog and there’s a lot of opportunity in this market. HP clearly wants to go after packaging and education and they will lead the charge with the Indigo 10000. Indigo is on fire at the moment with a CAGR of 19% in Indigo page growth since 2010.
How is HP doing in the office? SVP Pradeep Jotwani told us HP has now shipped over 200,000,000 Laserjets and is now #1 in MFP market share in the world. That’s pretty much all of what I remember about the general office from this meeting. In fact, this was the one portion of the Summit I thought was pretty lacking. Other than hearing a couple of key executives recognize that HP was not number one in managed print services, they didn’t have much to say about it. I know that part of this is due to how much HP had to talk about in only a couple of short days, but come on. You’re HP and I’m a print industry analyst. Help me cover you.
They made a big announcement last year about MPS with their OEM arrangement with Sharp Electronics for A3. I didn’t hear a single thing about it, nor were any of the rebadged Sharp MFPs at this event. In fact, there was very little printing hardware anywhere at this show. HP used to set up sample offices at these events so we could see how HP could support a customer from top to bottom. Computers, servers, printers, displays (at the time) – everything in one place. I know they want to focus on sexier products and services but 200,000,000 million Laserjets is a big deal. Let’s see them! Talk about where you’ve been, where you are and where you’re going…you’re HP, the biggest printer company on the block.
You know what would make me feel good about HP’s focus on MPS? Hearing some details about it. What big wins have you had? How have these A3 products helped? Are they even selling? What’s the reaction from the field been about these? And how are you going to grab that number one spot?
What’s going on with the other Laserjets? How many new models were introduced? How many will come out this year? I loved hearing executives from Merck and Courrier tell me how HP has helped them in other non-Laserjet areas (production, etc.). Let’s hear some similar stories from the Laserjet group. I just didn’t understand why this group was almost a non-entity at this event.
All in all it was an extremely information-filled event from the 30,000 foot level. I learned a lot about HP and their commitment to the Cloud and servers and big data and the Enterprise. I did hear and see some VERY interesting things that I will discuss in future articles but I was pretty let down by the lack of content targeted towards the SMB customer.
The bottom line is, HP has straightened the ship and they are killing it at the high and low ends of the print market. Indigo is stronger than ever and even though I personally think home photo printing is dying, HP seems to have figured out a way to really sink hooks into customers with an instant ink program they’ll never want to leave – it’s just so inexpensive and simple. HP is still the biggest kid on the block when it comes to this stuff. The target on their back isn’t going away but for the most part, they are clearly headed in the right direction.
