'We Are Far From Achieving A Paperless Office As Yet'

In a one-on-one with Biztech2, Nitin Hiranandani, director- Enterprise Sales and Services, IPG India, talks about the significance of the Imaging and Printing environment with respect to an enterprise/ SMB and about HP offerings and solutions in this space.

How do you think Imaging and Printing peripherals affect the total cost of ownership of an enterprise/ SMB?

I think they impact costs very significantly, and if we consider printing per se, not too many organisations have focused on their hard copy printing costs; that’s what HP’s enterprise strategy is all about, it’s a three-pillar strategy. The first pillar is ‘Optimising Infrastructure’, which educates the enterprise about the imaging and printing infrastructure, its role and it also leads to ‘Balanced Deployment’ between printers and MFDs.

The second pillar is about ‘Managing the Environment’, which essentially means tracking the printing network. This can be done seamlessly using our tools like Web Jetadmin, which enables you to track the number of copies and the type (colour or monochrome), and Universal Print Driver.

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The third pillar is ‘Improving the Workflow’, which in my opinion is the most significant in terms of the value chain and this includes jobs like moving a secured document over a network etc.

How do you think enterprises/ SMBs can reduce printing cost and what is the HP IPG way of doing it?

For any organisation to optimise its costs, it needs a reference point and you need to know what to do, how to do it and when to do it. HP’s solutions have been in the market for around six to seven years now but they become all the more relevant in today’s times as currently enterprises are much more sensitive to costs because of the slowdown.

To improve anything, it needs to be tracked first and that’s where our tracking solution comes in, which is called HP Access Control. This solution has two components, the first one is ‘Job Accounting’, which tells you who is printing how much in various departments. With this component, I can know how much printing is happening on each printer over the network and can actually bill back the cost to the individual departments. More than cutting costs, it also inculcates sensitivity among employees towards printing and the costs related to it.

The second component is Web Jetadmin, which I have mentioned earlier. Here, we need to understand one thing that unless we know the number of copies printed on a particular printer, we would never be able to decide if that particular printer (which could be an MFD or mid-range printer) where the monthly print output is say 20 pages a month can be replaced with an entry-level printer. The MFD, thus vacated can be put to a place where it can be exploited fully.

From HP IPG, we have a couple of other solutions like MegaTrack, which is again a tracking solution and SecureJet, which is a solution related to security of documents.

Do you think Imaging and Printing peripherals have a say in deciding how green or environment friendly a company is? If yes, how? What is the HP IPG’s vision with reference to green IT?

Definitely yes! The first factor is energy efficiency/ power efficiency and it has both cost as well as a green angle to it. As technology advances, products become more and more energy efficient, for example, HP has a target of making all its inkjet and laser peripherals 40 percent more energy efficient by 2011. The other aspect is recycling and we have a partnership programme with our channel partners where we recycle the toner cartridges; we also use lots of recycled material for our packaging.

One of the tools relevant in this aspect is our Carbon Footprint calculator, where you key in all the devices attached to your network and it calculates the power consumed and you can play around that data and decide how many carbon points you can earn. Also as stated earlier, tracking your printing will enable you to minimise/ reduce usage of paper and even wastage, which is all about going green.

Today, the trend is to try and achieve a paperless office, considering it has its effects in cost savings, and wastage of paper can also be reduced, or paper could just become obsolete. Do you see this as a possible reality?

In my opinion, while organisations are working hard towards reducing their (printing and imaging) costs, I think we are far from achieving a paperless office as yet. One of the fundamental reasons for this is that the amount of information that we deal in has increased by a difference of 100X as compared to what it was about two to three years ago. Considering the amount of information we deal with and the multitude of sources including the Web, we are almost every day faced by an information explosion. So even if we become sensitive to the amount of printing, the base has gone up so much in the past years that it is hard to achieve a paperless office.

The other aspect is related to culture, specifically in India, where we as consumers need to have hard copies and need to touch and feel everything we deal in. This is also one of the reasons why e-commerce is still in its infancy in India, whereas people abroad buy anything and everything over the Web.

What trends do you see in this space in the coming years?

One of the trends I foresee in the coming years is companies becoming more cost conscious with regards to their printing and imaging environment, and this also means buying more tracking solutions, which would help them optimise their costs.

The other trend I see is companies looking at either upgrading their existing infrastructure or outsourcing such needs to a third party. One of the hottest trends is definitely green IT. Moreover, in tough times like these, I see more and more enterprises entering into partnerships with other companies to create a win-win environment and save costs.