Staying Different in Same Camp, HP and Xerox Business Strategy

Originally published at CRN
Staying Different in Same Camp, HP and Xerox Business Strategy

HP’s Enrique Lores On Staying ‘Differentiated’ From Xerox Amid Printer Partnership

The president of HP’s printing business speaks with CRN about the implications of the partnership with rival Xerox, the growth of managed print services and the early results from the Apogee acquisition.

Last month, printer industry rivals HP Inc. and Xerox announced an agreement that will see Xerox sourcing certain A4 devices as well as entry-level A3 devices from HP.

While surprising on the face of it, the deal actually represented a continuation of an OEM arrangement that Xerox previously had with Samsung, prior to HP’s acquisition of Samsung’s printer business in 2017.

Enrique Lores, president of Imaging and Printing at HP Inc., spoke with CRN about the HP-Xerox partnership and how it fits into his company’s push for growth in the challenging printer market—as well as what it means for channel partners.

“In the market, the personalities of the two portfolios are going to stay fairly differentiated. The engines will be common. But all the software tools, the front panel, everything that customers will be interacting with is going to be different,” Lores said. “So I don’t think it’s going to make the situation more or less competitive for our partners, because the differentiation between the two portfolios is going to stay fairly high.”

When it comes to HP’s printers, “we offer better security, we offer better manageability, and our user interface is significantly simpler than the user interface from Xerox,” Lores said. “And for many years, the combination of these three factors has enabled us to have a significantly higher market share than any of our competitors.”

Lores also spoke about the growth of managed print services—and how that ties into HP’s efforts to reverse its supplies revenue decline—and discussed the early results of the company’s 2018 acquisition of European managed print services provider Apogee.

“We are really driving a big transformation of the business, by growing our printing-as-a-service business,” Lores said. “We are really committed to the channel. And as we change our business, we want to make sure that they change with us, and that we help them as much as we can in this transition.”

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