What is your impression in the few hours since you arrived?
It’s super impressive, the size, the scale. HP’s presence here is phenomenal and it shows the importance of the industry from our perspective. In one word, the show is awesome.
You were recently appointed to head up HP’s newly created Printing and Personal Systems Group. Two months into your new role what is your impression of the challenges facing the industry?
There are challenges and opportunities. Ironically, from our perspective, the biggest challenge is how we deploy the breadth of solutions we’ve developed. For example, in the past four years we have spent more than $1bn on research and development in professional print.
What do you think your prior experience in the PC arm will bring to your new role?
The PC business is a low-margin, high-velocity business and at HP we built the biggest most profitable PC business in the world. So I will be looking at how we consolidate our go-to-market capabilities and focus on our R&D and product capabilities, so that we can deploy our technology more aggressively.
Do you really think the merger of HP’s commercial print and PC divisions is good news for print, though?
First off it’s a broad merging of our entire printing group, not just commercial print with our personal systems group, so anything that is going to allow us to invest more is good for all the industries we serve. For example, I think there will be opportunities now for how our workstation business will interact with our digital printing business.
But is commercial print more or less important following the merger?
It remains exactly as important as it was before.
