This month’s state of the industry package on the Future Office/Smart Office (FOSO) technology movement included a manufacturer roundtable of experts from Ricoh, Xerox and Konica Minolta. Several other manufacturers are on the verge of releasing similar FOSO offerings, some of which are slated to be released by the end of the year.
As an addendum to the June editorial package, we’ve collected the thoughts of HP’s Paul Birkett, director, global workflow solutions, to garner insight into the manufacturer’s efforts to offer value-added tools that dealers can leverage to expand the conversation with clients beyond MFPs. We will follow up with future offerings as they become available.
Provide an overview of your future/smart office platform that includes all of its elements.
Birkett: Most companies nowadays have significant investments in digital transformation initiatives. These investments, led by cloud and mobile technologies, seek to create more agile, adaptive, collaborative environments that provide a competitive edge. HP is re-imagining the role of the MFP printer with a brand new ecosystem of smart apps and cloud services, designed with the highest standards of security in mind, to unleash the full power of the digital workplace with contextually-aware devices that bring user content and workflows to life at the touch of a button, connecting paper and users to digital workflows and producing unseen levels of productivity in the office. HP announced the following smart office-ready platforms in March at the HP Reinvent Partner Conference, including:
- HP JetAdvantage Apps: With apps that can be launched from the device control panel, users can now immediately access their content and print it or easily digitize content required as part of a workflow. During the beta phase of the JetAdvantage program, developers and partners created apps for HP MFP’s that ranged from general office applications, departmental applications and industry-specific applications designed to drive process automation throughout the company. HP cloud services make it much easier and more secure for partners and developers to take full advantage of the capabilities of the HP MFP.
- HP JetAdvantage Link: JetAdvantage Link is an open standard, industry-leading app developer program that makes it easier and faster than ever before to create apps for HP MFP devices, helping re-imagine what the MFP device can do. HP is on track to provide the broadest range of workflow integrations with 35 beta apps already available today and over 200 development partners.
- HP Smart Device Services (SDS): HP smart devices, machine-learning, and powerful cloud services reduce partner service costs and seamlessly integrate into their current MPS software ecosystem. Our partners can use SDS with HP managed MFPs and printers to predict failures of key components just before they happen, enabling a fix before the device fails, giving users a no-downtime experience.
Talk a little about the best opportunities for placement by dealers, and what are you doing to help them identify and place these technologies? Include insight into pre- and post-sales support.
Birkett: The best opportunities for dealers are those connected to customers that have a digital mindset and are adopting SaaS fast. Our platform has been designed with cloud and SaaS at its center, enabling dealers to remotely deploy and manage apps without having to send people on-site. Billing models are also SaaS-based, allowing them to pay for apps as they go rather than more traditional upfront investments. HP has a large pre-sales organization oriented to help customers and partners take full advantage of this ecosystem, providing ongoing training and consultancy as well as informing them of new opportunities as apps become available. We also offer the best post-sales support experience with an integrated content repository and forum infrastructure that allow dealers to search for known issues and easily find the answers to their questions. They can also post questions that are monitored 24×7 with people in all three regions.
What are the greatest objections dealers need to overcome in providing these technologies?
Birkett: Anything that involves cloud technologies always brings security as a concern. This is where HP’s promise and unilateral focus on security is so important to provide peace of mind to our customers. As the most secure vendor in the print industry, we invest considerable amounts of effort into securing our devices as well as our cloud infrastructure with the highest security standards to ensure our customers brand reputation and business are not impacted.
As your future office/smart office platform evolves, where can we expect to see the greatest enhancements? Will they encompass A.I./IoT-enabled augmentations to existing workflows, software plug-ins, partner integrations, etc.?
Birkett: Expect to see the greatest enhancements to our unique JetAdvantage Link Developer Program, with an increase in the number of resellers and developers bringing value-added workflow solutions on HP MFPs, delivering the largest, most comprehensive portfolio of apps in the industry.
HP will continue to tear down barriers between paper and digital and delivering on what businesses need today and in the future with our strategy to enable the Office of the Future today with smarter solutions and services, with the security businesses need, along with the strongest printer and MFP lineup in the industry. We’ll continue to invest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) to drive even higher levels of productivity and automation to our partners and our customers, from predicting when devices will fail with self-healing to devices that can extract the relevant data from content to drive workflow automation.
HP will also continue to help our partners manage their customer’s print environment with Smart Devices Services, with predictive services, giving an accurate forecast of when a device will fail to help reduce service costs, maximize device uptime and deliver an exceptional service to millions of devices around the world. This all helps HP service providers remotely resolve problems and arm their service techs with the information to achieve higher first visit fix rates.
