When Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice-president of the Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) at HP, says the idea of the paperless office has failed the reality test, what comes across clearly is his enthusiasm for the printed paper. The 57-year-old veteran with HP believes people’s appetite for holding printed paper can only grow stronger with the spread of the world wide web and digital photography. Joshi, who joined HP in 1980 as a research and development engineer, spearheads the company’s drive to become not merely the world’s premier printer company, but the world’s No. 1 content consumption company. Here, VJ, as he is known in the company, speaks to Alokananda Chakraborty and Saumya Prakash about the relevance of printing in a digital age and how HP is leading the change in the consumer market space.
Last year HP launched the web-connected printers. At the launch HP said it sees the future of printing in the cloud. Can you elaborate?
See how we have transformed — going from printers to pagers, from PC connectivity only to connecting all our printers to the web and to the cloud. And it is for all the three segments — consumers, small and medium business, and the enterprise.
If you look at consumers, say, in India, there are more smart phones than PCs or notebooks, and because of the web connectivity and cloud awareness, we will be able to take a picture in one place and print it in another. Every printer that we ship has an email address; we could just take a picture, send it to the printer and the receiver will be able to see the actual picture anywhere, print it anywhere anytime. I have a very interesting use case. Think about a grandma who doesn’t want to switch on a PC. You buy a printer for her, and give that email address to the extended family. They could be anywhere and when they take pictures they could just send it to that printer, and grandma can look at it and feel good. That is what we are talking about. We are talking about simplifying and connecting and really capturing content and printing it anywhere anytime.
Security is a major hot topic in the sector right now. How is HP addressing that issue, say, in the case of the web-connected printer?
We do lot of work in the cloud so that nobody can hack. Privacy is extremely important. There are three layers of security. We do lot of work to make sure that there is no spam. The second thing is when you buy a printer, you will be opening what we call an e-print centre, and there you can figure out what is the email address of your printer, and you also decide who has rights to print on the printer. In short, you can decide who can print and which emails you will allow and which you won’t allow. I think those two things are going to be very important for security.
You have time and again spoken about innovation in your company and in the last one decade or so you have worked with three different leaders and you have also seen the entire technology landscape changing. How does a company continue to innovate under such circumstances?
There are five key principles that I have always believed are very crucial in continuing innovation. The first key principle is to really understand the market trends and technology trends way earlier than anybody else. So we ask ourselves what is going on around us: What is going on in the web; what is going on in social networking; what is going on in printing technology; and what is happening with the customers? Ten years ago customers did not have access to the internet as they do right now, they didn’t have digital cameras. So the most important part is understanding the market and technology trends and customer behaviour, and based on that figuring out how you could satisfy customer needs. The second key success factor is to figure out what the market pricing will be and the business model — how you are going to make money because you could have great innovation but if you can’t commercialise it, it won’t be really big scale.
The third is partnership. For example, earlier I would talk about partnership with Microsoft; now I will talk about partnership with Apple and Google. It is important to understand who are the key players in this ecosystem and make sure that you have the right partnership. The fourth key success factor is to have great people because ultimately it is people who make all the difference. People who are really innovative, people who really understand how to make a contribution.
The fifth is the leadership. If you want to have thought leadership, you need not pay attention sometimes to the environment, which is changing rapidly, but focus on the contribution, on developing your people, on the fact that the number one job that you have is to grow the company consistently. If you think about 2001, our imaging and printing revenue was $19 billion, and we made $1.9 billion operating profit. In 2010 with $26 billion we made $4.3 billion. Amid all the changes we focused on those five things and continued to grow.
You just said the first key principle in continuing innovation is to really understand the market trends and technology trends way earlier than anybody else. What are the dangers of innovating too rapidly? How do you avoid that?
Because we are in this business for 27 years we have some very good processes. We have what we call the product life cycle with very clear phases — there is an investigation phase, there is a lab phase, there is a production prototype phase and then we do manufacturing ramp and then we introduce the product. We look at the quality and performance at every phase of the produce development cycle to make sure that when we get the product out it has the right quality, right reliability, and the performance that we want. Of course, if you just hurry up and say we need to introduce the product and not follow that product life cycle, you could get into trouble.
That brings me to my next question. You talk about developing new products consistently, staying ahead of the curve, satisfying consumer needs, and have a sustainable business model. How does one put all that together?
That is the magic I talked about, the five key success factors. We have really built a great team and try to understand where things are going. We bring a product into the market when we are confident that we will be leading the market. In every single category that we are in right now, we are number one. The magic happens when you have the right combination of people and the way you do things.
How does HP’s IPG go about reducing its carbon footprint while trying to increase consumption of printing?
One of the key things we are working on is what I call digital printing. In the analogue world, irrespective of whether your book is going to be a best seller or not you are going to print 100,000 books, because that is the minimum run to publish a book. In digital, you could actually say I am going to print what I need. And that makes a huge difference. Digital means on-demand printing, and that’s environment friendly because you print what you need. We do a lot of work with enterprise customers and say look what you should do is print on both sides; we have drivers by which we can print on both sides, we use new technology where the energy consumption in printing is down by 40 per cent.
After the web-connected printers, what would be the next big thing for HP?
We are working on developing new applications for our web-connected printers. I will give you an example. Today, you get most of the coupons on a Sunday newspaper. So housewives will cut the coupons and then take it to the supermarket and so on. Once you have enough web-connected printers, let us say 10 million of them in India, then you have 10 million customers who are connected by the web, they could pull the coupons from the printer and then print them right there, at the supermarket. Just like on your smart phone you are running many applications, we are going to run various applications on the printer. I think that is where things are moving. We are going to make the printer a web-services platform with which you can run many applications.
Will the paperless office ever be a reality?
In 1984 we had the first article on paperless office. Since then more paper is being used in offices everywhere. The reason for that is information explosion and that is the reason I think printing is going to be healthy. What is going to happen is that analogue printing is going to be flat to down, but digital will actually go up. In fact, it is already happening.
Last but not the least, could you talk about the importance of the India in your global scheme of things?
India is a very significant opportunity for the imaging and printing business. If you think of the last six months it is growing double digits, and my view is we are going to grow faster than India’s GDP growth. It is a big market, and among other things, it is a very paper centric market. Also people read a lot. Elsewhere in the world newspaper and magazine readership is declining, people are moving on to the web editions. In India the segment is growing. That is why I truly believe it is a big opportunity for IPG — by 2014, India will be 120 billion page market. If you compare India with China, China is also paper centric and is bigger for now. China is our biggest market in Asia. The US is the biggest overall.
