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HP Pushing for More of Digital Printing Market

HP Pushing for More of Digital Printing Market

Company’s Rancho Bernardo Facility At Center of Company’s Efforts

BY BRAD GRAVES

The way Stephen Nigro puts it, there is plenty of room to grow in Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Imaging and Printing Group.

Of 18 trillion images put to paper each year, only 4 percent are printed using digital means. The rest, from photocopies to photographic prints to the newspaper you hold in your hand, are transferred to paper using analog means.

Getting another 4 percent of that market “would be fantastic,” Nigro said.

Nigro, a senior vice president within the group, was seated at a table at the Four Seasons Resort Aviara in Carlsbad. As the crow flies, it’s a short distance from HP’s Rancho Bernardo campus, where some 1,500 Imaging and Printing Group employees work.

Company executives were at the hotel last week to introduce new products to the media and industry analysts. They were also there to promote HP’s managed printing services for enterprises organizations that run large, complicated computer systems.

Nigro a Corvallis, Ore. resident who grew up here and recalled high-school football rivalries of the late ’70s said HP plans to increase business for his group by 10 percent per year. Currently the Imaging and Printing Group has yearly sales of $22 billion.

“The world is going to convert from analog to digital,” he said. “It’s inevitable.”

Vyomesh Joshi, the San Diego-based executive vice president for HP’s Imaging and Printing Group, said there are three areas his company will attack: photo printing, photocopying and digital publishing.

In other parts of the hotel, HP representatives showed off digital printers that combine the technologies of an offset press and a laser printer machines that also have the capability of customizing mass-printed materials.

HP used the Carlsbad event to introduce a number of products. They included an $800 color printer for homes and offices, and a computer server dedicated to print jobs. Company representatives said the latter, called a print server appliance, can efficiently handle automatic driver distribution, spooling and print queue hosting.

The Carlsbad show came one day after HP celebrated the 1-year anniversary of its acquisition of Compaq Computer Corp. The company marked that milestone by announcing wide-ranging initiatives to help customers’ information technology systems better adapt to change.

HP trades on the New York Stock Exchange as HPQ.

Workers at the company’s San Diego campus design “all-in-one” products, which combine the capabilities of a printer, a copier, a scanner, and a fax machine.

The company also develops its inkjet photo printers here, as well as the media the paper that goes in those printers.

All-in-one printers and inkjet photo printers have been the two fastest-growing product lines within the Imaging and Printing Group, Nigro said.

On top of that, 600 employees in San Diego develop print cartridges for HP’s more pricey business and commercial products. The company performs early manufacturing for those products here as well.

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