Putting on a dealer event that entails bringing 600 partners from around the globe for a three-day meeting can be exhausting. Just ask John Bruno, president and COO of Xerox. That means milking as much of those 24 hours a day as humanly possible for meetings. And when your company has designs on becoming no less than No. 2 in the market as Xerox does, coming off a year in which two significant acquisitions boosted its A4 and IT value proposition, sleep can be a commodity that’s difficult to come by.
“I’m constantly answering emails at two or three in the morning,” he admitted during a one-on-one with ENX Magazine during the Xerox 2025 Global Partner Summit in Las Vegas earlier this month. “People ask me all the time, ‘do you ever sleep?’”
Caffeine is a good go-to for the folks always on the go. But even though CEO Steve Bandrowczak had promised Bruno a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee heading into a 5:45 a.m. conference call recently, the sad reality was the meeting commenced before the shop was even open. “That’s terrible when we’re up before the people who make coffee,” Bruno added.
There was little doubt that a lot was at stake for the Xerox executives. The acquisition of ITsavvy (price tag $400 million) and Lexmark ($1.5 billion) represented a huge commitment for the manufacturer during a time when many companies have been clutching their purses. While building their IT muscles was vital, the Lexmark deal is the crowning jewel, the fork in the road of a post-John Valentin, post-Carl Icahn Xerox world. Bruno being given the green light to pursue Lexmark signaled a move toward the manufacturer becoming more competitive in the field. This dealer conference was all about emphasizing the future.
Taking Stock
The show was in part about conveying how much Xerox understands their dealer partner base. “Like us, they have to reinvent their business,” Bruno said. “You have to decide which part of your portfolio is going to come from soft assets, and which part will be from hard assets. What’s the assessment of your capabilities? What are you going to invest in yourself? Jacques-Eduoard [Gueden, chief channel and partner officer] did a wonderful job discussing all the investments we’re making to help our partners manage the transition that we see.”
Print is not dead, he noted, an all-too-familiar refrain echoing through the manufacturer set. Still, he took a pragmatic approach to the subject. Yes, the erosion is hovering around 2%-3% per year, so maybe in 10 years we’ve looking at a 25% reduction—no small consideration. Where many analysts and skeptics part ways is the question of whether we’ve seen the bulk of print evaporation. If print can absorb the punch of COVID, perhaps the bleeding will gradually slow and volumes will settle into a new norm. But it won’t be without a market reconciliation for both dealers and manufacturers.
“I could imagine a world where [print] continues to consolidate and shift, and you start to see it flattening out, stabilizing, even having some growth spurts,” Bruno observed. “It’s going to be a long, drawn out process through this environment, because there are too many vendors supporting fewer clients. There are fewer pages being printed and fewer clients buying the actual service. But there hasn’t been a consolidation in the industry to the extent that there will be over time.”
The key for Xerox is to become that partner of choice for dealers. Now that its Reinvention plan is coming more into focus, the moving-forward focus revolves around stabilization.
“The level of change that we’ve inflicted on this company is significant—rewiring 6,000 positions, streamlining decisions, reorganizing into a segment model and moving out of a geography model, and acquiring these assets,” he said. “It’s about our forecast accuracy, our ability to understand the client, to deliver value and to have our core business being very solid. For me [2025] is the stabilization of what we’ve acquired and ingested. We’ll get back on to the types of things where we’ll double down in the areas where we see [opportunities] or course correct in areas that aren’t producing. This is a stabilization year.”
