Traditionally RICOH has been a player in the office copier/printer/multifunction business, but its acquisition of IBM's printing division allows it to offer printing services as well. RICOH gets access to IBM's existing client base in the IT segment. With the acquisition of Hitachi Printing Solutions, RICOH can also cater to the high-end printing market segment.

Basically, when you combine both RICOH and IBM, there is a huge quantum of market available. IBM helps RICOH expand from its office business space to the tech and to business sections as well.

What kind of solutions does Infoprint provide?

Infoprint offers various solutions like production printing, office printing and industrial printing.

The production printing comprises very high volume printing. Our customers in this segment are large companies or large print solution providers. We've some very high speed printers that are the fastest in the world. Our fastest printer in black and white prints 1440ppm (pages per minute).

Office printing is what RICOH is primarily good at and is the most popular. We provide B2B and B2C printing solutions. This technology can be used to manage a fleet of printers. We also provide managed services to offices to optimize their printing needs, as 1-3% of the turnover is allocated to printing and archiving a document.

Industrial printing involves logistics and technologies that can make use of RFID and thermal printing. We are one of the very rare companies that has an RFID printer.

What is Transpromo all about?

Transpromo fills the gap that exists between creativity and the traditional way of printing in high volume. Our solution can print variable data in color at very high speed. It can take the process and business of printing to the next level.

For instance, many a times, banks, telecom companies, hotels, etc., are obliged to issue a bill or a statement for archival purposes. This case is also true for many or most SMBs. Presume a hotel has invested in the top of line CRM solution, which does data mining for it. The solution will enable the hotel to figure out what services you used and what you didn't, what type of cuisine you like, etc. So the next time you visit the hotel, you might have a promotional offer, rebate or discount on the bill.

Our value proposition is to provide a solution that will make the statement/bill look pleasant by adding colors. You can also add an advertisement, promotional offers, etc. This makes the user take notice of the statement that would otherwise have gone to the bin or stow in a file for future references.

From a company perspective, you can do promos and advertising campaigns for other companies. This can be a new a revenue model. Until now bills and statements were seen as an expense to the company - in terms of paper used, postage etc. However, now you can get someone else to pay for it.

For example, a telecom company can have a promo for Nokia selling a new handset for a particular class of customers. Nokia will pay for the space on the bill for that particular telecom company. Based on the redemptions which happen, marketing managers will measure the success of their campaign. This is how marketing managers can measure ROI.

Is Infoprint for SMBs?

In India, we look at the SMBs as indirect clients for the print service providers who are our largest target segment that falls under the subset of production printing. Most small banks, insurance companies, etc., are outsourcing their printing requirements to print service providers across the country. Only 20% of our clients are large enterprisers, else most others are SMBs.

What are the features used in the printer? How do they benefit businesses?

Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) architecture, printer management, logging and active reporting, remote management, Intelligent Printer Data Stream (IPDS) are the technologies that we use.

AFP architecture allows you to have bi-directional printing. Thus the data that is getting printed can be verified in real time. The printer also features what we call "smart error recovery". When it senses a page break or a paper jam, it immediately stops printing. While it's a standard feature in most high-end printers, this technology is able to resume printing at a page level rather than a file level. So, you don't have to start printing from the beginning. The event can also be logged for future references with the help of which one can verify what got printed and what didn't. Re-printing is not only a costly affair, but also affects print cycles which in turn affect business.

Printer management software allows you to do pre-programmed jobs. You can pre-format a job in which only the data is going to change. This helps in printing faster. We also have other features like form identification that acts as a barcode reader for stationary. When you are running a job, especially in the SMB segment where prints are outsourced, you can have multiple customers with similar data coming in. This software ensures that the right data is being printed on the right stationary. This can help in reducing human errors as well as human intervention.

The printer software can perform logging and active reporting. It can be configured to define events and react to the events automatically. For example, while running a 24 hour print job, if there is a paper jam or toner issue, an SMS or an Email can be sent at a pre-defined time interval. If the problem remains unsolved for a particular time interval, a notification could be sent to higher management. This makes the logging system active instead of passive.

The printer can be remotely managed and administered using the right infrastructure. When the system is down, the call engineer could know in advance what the problem is and he can come prepared with the right tools and parts to save on service times and maximize system uptime which is crucial for all businesses.

IPDS is a page control language that reduces the size of files that are sent for printing. For example, if you are printing a 900 page file in color, the file size will be enormous which in turn will require infrastructure in terms of storage space as well as more bandwidth. You would also require huge computing power to just rasterize (translating the file to dots) the image, thereby increasing print times. Besides doing parallel processing, it rasterizes the data at a page level instead of the file level. This process allows for last minute changes to data. You can have a printer that prints pretty fast, but if the data doesn't come on time, it's of no use. We basically provide a complete end-to-end solution.

These features can be applied to SMBs who have much smaller machines based on their printing requirements. This, we believe, is our Unique Selling Proposition (USP). We are the only company in the world that can do 20 ppm to 1500 ppm using the same architecture and with the same service level.

How do you conduct business in India?

Since production printing was our key strength, we started working with print service providers who had a problem in managing large volume printing. Thus, we started off with the SMB segment in India. Having tasted success, we started working with large IT companies that were traditionally IBM business partners, as we had access to them. This is how we forayed into industrial printing and provide tailor-made solutions to large enterprises.

Our business is mission critical, so providing top service becomes a very important factor. Services for industrial printing are taken care of by us directly and not by the distributors. We provide services by ourselves, as we need to provide 24/7 support to companies. However, some of our partners are capable of taking small repair kind of work.

How do your solutions ensure high ROI and low TCO?

It's a human tendency to focus on directs costs while not taking into account indirect costs. Hence, we aim at helping companies see the larger picture.

Labour in a print process can be 40% of the costs. We try to eliminate labour costs and reduce human errors to a minimum with the use of these features. High availability ensures high ROI. Wastage is minimum due to optimized processes. Cost per page is also reduced by technological improvements in hardware.

What are your future plans?

The printing business is surely going digital in the future. Hence, the potential market for us is 10 times bigger. We see India and China as good economies that are growing and are looking at doubling our business in APAC.