HP

Last post I talked in depth about print management. There are a number of tools available that you can use to manage your print costs. Many of the tools that are available cost some money and can provide different benefits to your organization.

I tend to think that Web Jetadmin is HP's best kept secret. The management capability from an IT perspective allows for you to control many aspects of your print environment. These management capabilities allow you to decrease your costs and increase your operational efficiencies.

I mentioned in my last post that there are three key areas that can allow you to positively affect your bottom line. These three areas are standardization, consolidation and location. The largest advantage of properly optimizing your print fleet to these areas is that you can utilize a tool such as Web Jetadmin to manage many of the features of the print devices on your network. Here are just some of the things that you can do with Web Jetadmin. continue reading...

In my last post, I mentioned that I did a little research on HP. While I think that HP missed an opportunity to further the discussion with their customers, I think that they do many things very well.

One of the areas they have been very successful in is print management.

I thought I would take a moment to define print managment a little and how you can reduce your operating expense by employing an effective print management strategy.

The Challenge in Printing:

It is interesting to me that most organizations simply underestimate their cost of operation for their printers and copiers. According to a recent Gartner Group study, organizations underestimate their costs by as much as  50% and will spend up to 3% of their total annual revenue on document output. Fortunately, the bulk of my business is web development, so I use very little paper and print very little, however, I have found that most companies that claim to be paperless or who have employed an electronic document management system find they may even exceed those numbers. continue reading...

So many companies now are talking about solutions. Is that really what they are providing? I think that most companies are selling "boxes." A lot of people talk about solution selling but in the end the solution they try to sell ends up being whatever they happen to have on their shelf; isn't that really a box sale?

Evidentially, I am not the only one that feels this way about the technology industry. Tom Foremski at the Silicon Valley Watcher pointed out the same thing with HP in a post he wrote titled Is HP an IT services company? He points out:

Whenever I used to hear Ann Livermore, or Carly Fiorina, the message over the past seven years has been that HP is an IT solutions company. I didn't hear a thing about IT solutions, just a bunch of stuff about application performance from HP operating systems and servers. I didn't hear about any specific applications, just "average" applications, nothing about IT solutions of any kind.

In my opinion, most everyone that talks about "solutions" are really just relabeling their "boxes." If you want to sell a solution, you really need to focus on the problem first. If you don't look at the business problem your product solves, then there is no way, in good conscious, that you can call what you provide as a solution. Sounds to me like HP has fallen into its old model of pushing products... does that surprise anyone? continue reading...