THE YEAR AHEAD: LEXMARK
January 31, 2008 - As part of our continuing
series on the year ahead, Keith Jones, vice president of worldwide
product marketing for Lexmark’s Printing Solutions and Services Division, told bliQ what
Lexmark's primary goals and challenges are for 2008.
As with other hard-copy device makers, Lexmark
International is targeting solutions and services to augment its traditional
hardware product mix in 2008. “While customers are very interested in the core
product features and pricing, they are increasingly interested in solutions,
services and sustainability attributes,” said Jones. “We see this trend
continuing and accelerating in the years ahead.”
Consequently, one of Lexmark’s key goals in 2008 is to
help customers use printing and imaging technologies to speed up and simplify
business processes, thus improving productivity and reducing costs. “We see
more businesses looking beyond device consolidation and asking us to help them
evaluate their entire printing infrastructure to see how they can leverage
technology most effectively for their business,” said Jones.
Lexmark made progress in that area in 2007, releasing
three versions of its X646dte monochrome laser MFP customized for the
healthcare, education and the legal industries. The company also expanded its
color laser printer and MFP lines with introductions that included four Fall
2007 BLI “Pick of the Year” winners: the C782,
C935,
X644e
MFP and X945e
MFP.
“Beyond new products and industry awards, we've made
good progress in our business market segments,” said Jones. Last year, Lexmark
significantly expanded its sales coverage of enterprise accounts and added
resources to support its SMB (small and medium-size business) efforts. Jones
expects those pushes to continue in 2008. “We continue to see good success in
our industry initiatives, with our customers showing strong interest in our
workflow solutions and services capabilities,” he said.
When it comes to Lexmark’s dealers and resellers,
Jones sees challenges as the market shifts from a hardware approach to a
solutions-oriented approach. “One of the key challenges that we are seeing in
the channel is surrounding managed print services,” said Jones. To help with
that part of the equation, Jones points to tools such as Lexmark Fleet Manager,
which can let channel partners increase deployments of device-neutral managed
printer services. “What we're trying to do is bring value to dealers through
these tools that we've honed and developed and tested in some of the world's
largest enterprises,” said Jones. “That gets them access to the consumables
stream and providing large click-charge types of services engagements with
their customers.”
As for Lexmark itself, Jones sees the primary
challenge in the year ahead as one of responding to customer needs as Lexmark
has done in the past. “Our competitive differentiation remains strong, with
customer intimacy being at the heart of it,” he said. “Our strategy is to match
the needs and challenges of our customers with Lexmark technology, solutions
and services in a way that enables our customers to improve their workflow,
optimize their output environment and actually print less.”
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