With the big names in the offset world shaking hands with manufacturers of digital production kit on sales and technology deals, HP has been notably absent from the party. Morgan explained: "Partnering with offset is not something that is high on our list. I do think we - because of our breadth that we bring to market and because we're part of the larger HP - we have a lot of scale, but that doesn't mean we go it alone. We have more than 100 solutions partners, including a strategic partnership with Pitney Bowes. But we don't feel a high priority need to be out partnering with offset - we're much more focused on digital growth."

"We're the leading graphics provider," he continued. "We're also sitting as the leading digital printer vendor within the largest IT company. So when I look at where the whole printing industry is going,  particularly commercial printing - that mixture of digital print and the IT infrastructure, including cloud computing services, that goes with that - we feel that blending is going to be more important, particularly as you get into things like variable data utilization. I also think cloud computing will be the tool that better connects content to digital print capabilities."

One direct iteration of that is HP's cloud computing initiative MagCloud - a service that enables publishers to create digital versions of magazines but enables readers to cherry pick content to create the end product. However Morgan did not provide any information on MagCloud volume and pages to date, nor would he comment on expanding its rollout and downplayed its relevance.

"For us MagCloud is one piece of a much larger set of activities," he said. "Our focus is publishing and that extends to many different places and MagCloud is one piece of that. We've been happy and are learning a lot from that, but I wouldn't say it's the center of our publishing focus right now. We have much more dominant themes."

During the interview, Morgan repeatedly expressed confidence in the continued growth of digital printing, noting that even during the darkest days of the global recession in 2009 there were trends in the printing space that actually accelerated the use of digital.

"What we saw was that a lot of upstream customers who were buying print became much more targeted, given the challenges of 2009, and that trend has stayed on," he said. "The days of doing one very large marketing collateral run are over. We're seeing much more focus on the testing and going in with targeted clusters. There was also a lot of focus on removing waste and that waste could be excess materials sitting in warehouses because they're out of date or the waste of sending extra pages that weren't really relevant to a customer. We saw during the economic crisis the scrubbing of all available expense management and to a large degree that helped to focus more attention on digital capabilities."

"Digital first came in to solve some of the short run issues," he continued. "But increasingly it's moving up into mainstream printing. Our Indigo page growth, as we reported in the last quarter, was up 22%."

The main reason for that growth, Morgan said, is that increasingly businesses are looking at digital as a way to optimize their total costs, even beyond printing. "Can I  pull warehouses out of a publishing cycle, can I pull wasted pages out, can I pull issues that deal with the timeliness of content, can I pull costs out of signage?" he added. "Variable data lends also itself more to digital with the ability to target a cluster or just an individual - that provides a lot more value than just doing a static page over and over. Just being able to not only optimize total print costs, but also optimize the larger total costs - and value - is why digital is just going to continue to see good growth."

HP alongside increasing digital pages HP also reported a 42% rise in commercial hardware shipment in its Q2 financials and while Morgan would not predict growth would continue at that pace, he did say the company's breadth of offerings continues to serve them well in the graphics space.  "We're present with our Indigo technology," he added. "We're present with our high speed web presses - which we have a lot of momentum and exciting announcements in that space - and we're also very present in signage and the wide-format space  so we're not trying to force a single answer everywhere. We have the flexibility to adjust to any market."

On the subject of HP's T-range of color inkjet web presses, Morgan noted that while HP had only just announced the T400 in March, adding currently only one customer the T300 continued to gain ground. "Certainly with the 300 series, we've seen very good traction on that and a lot of the customers that bought first units have come back and purchased a second and in some cases a third unit. That just shows that it's not a novelty - it's being used in a big way and I think that's a real sign of strength."

He added: "One area where we've seen a lot of installs is in publishing and in that case it's just the ability to do better supply-chain matching," he said, citing the health care industry as another space where T300 adoption is strong."

Morgan wouldn't comment on whether he expected to see any significant changes in ink cost as uptake increases, only noting, "We'll continue to focus on innovating and having the best solutions for the market and it's not just ink, it's the whole combination."

As for the future of the printing industry, Morgan noted size alone won't be the sole determinant of which printers will thrive going forward. "I see printers very actively working with their customers to optimize total costs and total value and those printers are going to add more value to their customers and get better returns," he said. "The printers who are just waiting for their customers to come to them in the old print bid model, that's probably the toughest place to be in the market right now."

Closer to home HP has had to cope with changes of its own, bringing in a new CEO Léo Apotheker, formerly of SAP, to replace outgoing Mark Hurd last September. In setting out his vision for the company Apotheker barely mentioned his company's commercial printing business, but Morgan assured us he's very involved in his division, adding "I can tell you Leo is very engaged and knows my business well."