As we reported last month, overall sales of copiers, printers and MFPs have risen more than 8% compared to last year’s numbers.

Now, Xerox has recently announced its second quarter profits jumped 62% as earnings rose 48%, compared to last quarter.

That performance beat experts’ predictions, AOL’s Daily Finance reports.

Said Xerox chairman and CEO Ursula Burns: “Through the first half of the year, we’ve made excellent progress in scaling our services business and strengthening our leadership in the marketplace. We expect this progress will continue, positioning us well to increase our earnings expectations for the full year.”

The Web-based software comes in two parts:

The end-user interfaces gives advice on how to print greener and more environmentally sound. The program pops up after a user submits a print job, advising them to, for example, print in duplex to save money. (Actually, that’s the only advice that I can find any documentation for.)

More important, the management component is more elaborate. It allows management to detect printing patterns, by user or group. It generates reports based on print tracking on how the management can save money on printing.

The catches (you knew there had to be some):

• The program, available in the fall, will be free for users of Xerox’s ColorQube 9200 Series MFPs, which are Xerox’s highly rated and economical solid ink printers. It won’t support other Xerox copiers or printers, at least at first.
• As sound as the software might be, it’s never going to advise you to print some jobs on, say, your Canon copier or Kyocera printer, we expect, even if those machines might be more economical or more green
• It’s not going to advise users to print less color and more black-and-white, especially for internal use.

In reality, this package is aimed at ColorQube-oriented shops, which Xerox states are growing in number. Given that Xerox has several different supply pricing schemes for the product, the advice is welcome.

And the principle is a good one, and I’m sure Xerox will expand its scope and other vendors will offer similar tools. Too bad it can’t analyze whether 40 of the 100 prints a user generates end up in the trash unread — now that will be provide some real savings!

For example:

• Lexmark, one of the few pure plays in the industry, reported a 61% year-over-year jump in profits along with an approximately 10% increase in sales volume
• Ricoh, another near-pure play, saw profits up over 40%
• Canon saw a 400% rise in profits and a 10% increase in income, with gains in both the camera and printer/copier areas.
• Xerox saw revenue growth of 33%. That is complicated by the just-completed acquisition of consulting services company ACS, but the company reported a moderate increase in equipment sales and a large boost in revenue from sales and services.
• Kodak showed a slim profit in the first quarter, a big boost over the steep losses of the previous year. It also showed a 31% revenue gain. The company attributed the gain to increased printer and print supply sales.
• European retail analysts report printer sales are up for the first time in two years.

All-in-all, great news for the industry after two years in the wilderness. For end users the good news is that these companies will be able to afford continued R & D efforts, allowing them to continue to make printers faster, greener and better.

The survey, conducted during the fourth quarter of 2009, interviewed executives from over 100 companies, in industries ranging from manufacturing to financial services. It discovered that 53% of the companies interviewed have started in-house green initiatives. That was up from 43% of companies in the previous year’s survey.

Those initiatives, which involved both saving money and reducing waste, include such projects as:

1. Recycling and paper reduction (95%)
2. Web and/or teleconferencing (85%)
3. Wellness (80%)
4. Internal green communication program (78%)
5. Green Web site via organizational intranet (58%)
6. Telecommuting (57%)

Almost two-thirds of the companies said that the programs have already resulted in savings in both paper and electricity. While 94% noted that cost savings were a major motivator for the program, 82% said a desire for community goodwill was also a major motivator.

If you are looking to get buy-in for a green initiative at your company, this survey may be helpful in proving your point.

The machine, which could handle paper up to 9″ x 14″ worked at blazing speed of 7 pages per minute.

Copiers have gotten so common that it is hard to remember a time when typists stuck together a half-dozen pages divided by carbon paper in order to have backup copies of a report. It was a messy business, and the copies would look progressively worse than the original. The alternative was using primitive copiers with slick thermal paper, sort of like that used by fax machines up to a decade ago. What a change it was to have any number of copies of any document. Copies whose quality was almost as good as the original.

Fortune magazine reports an amusing story that shows that little has changed in the world of business prognostication:

“In 1958 IBM, which was considering partnering on the copier with Haloid Xerox, hired consulting firm Arthur D. Little. The A.D. Little report done for IBM concluded that the 914 had ‘no future in the office copying market.’”

One other thing: The 914 was a great hit but it had one annoying drawback — a tendency to catch on fire. Xerox later equipped the model with its own fire extinguisher.

Managed print services involves the service company taking over the placement, management and support for all output devices in a company, in return for a fixed cost, up to 30% lower than the company is currently paying.

Savings are achieved by concentrating devices, getting rid of old machines with high cost of operation, and encouraging best practices (such as two-sided output, scan-to-email and appropriate use of color).

The Wall Street Journal reports a major increase in the popularity of such services. The article cites numbers from Photizo Group, a Lexington, Ky., market research firm, which calculates that the print outsourcing business reached $20 billion last year, up 37% from the year before. That’s in a year when total shipments of printers and copiers only reached $4.8 billion, down 77% from the previous year.

The WSJ article cites one big example: Procter & Gamble. “Xerox is replacing some 45,000 devices, mostly H-P desktop printers, with about 10,000 shared multifunction devices that are mostly made by Xerox.” But it’s not just global corporations: Small companies, government offices, schools and universities are all being pursued by managed print services sales people.

HP is the leader, according to Photizo, with 35% share. Xerox comes in second with 20%. Others, including Canon, Ricoh, and Lexmark are trailing, but working hard to catch-up.

That describes a new technology from Xerox that will let manufacturers print electronic semiconductors onto a wide variety of surfaces, including thin plastic film and fabrics, using silver-based inks. This new technology is inexpensive and requires only a lightweight printer, not very different from current photo printers.

The applications are numerous.  The most familiar one is direct printing of an RFID  (Radio Frequency Identification) tag on, for example, products in a store, without needing special tags, as is now the case. But the implications are much bigger.  They include:

• Creating ultra-thin video displays, for use in portable computing or for making inexpensive, large screens for advertising and entertainment. Imagine, for example, a full-size computer screen you could roll up into briefcase, than attach to your Blackberry or iPhone to make an instant on-the-road computer.
• Throwaway devices that give a warning of an expiration date or the need for a refill.
• A variety of toys that make use of  lightweight computing for sound and motion
• Devices that will quietly track and record the usage of equipment, allowing, for example, for improved resource allocation, maintenance scheduling or traffic management.

The key breakthrough in the new Xerox process is the ability to fuse the silver ink at low temperatures. While the mature silicon-based semiconductor industry is capable of much, it requires very expensive machines and absolute laboratory conditions.  By contrast, it is claimed, the silver ink technology does not require elaborate centralized lab environments, which will allow smaller players to get into the market and create very focused, even custom, electronics at an affordable price.

According to a Xerox spokesperson, “We will be able to print circuits in almost any size from smaller custom-sized circuits to larger formats such as wider rolls of plastic sheets — unheard of in today’s silicon-wafer industry.”

Xerox’s new small-workgroup color laser printer

The $399 Phaser 6140 is a network-ready, small-workgroup printer that prints 19ppm in color and 21ppm in black-and-white. The 6140 offers surprisingly strong features in spite of its low price.

Ethernet, PCL, and PostScript are standard features with optional Wi-Fi. The maximum paper capacity is 500 sheets. The exit tray holds 150 sheets.

Consumables costs run at around 3.5¢ per page for black-and-white and 17.0¢ for color. These are high, but not far outside the average at this price and speed point.

Xerox rates the maximum monthly duty cycle as 40,000 pages, with a more realistic recommended monthly volume of 2,500 pages. Xerox touts its green development with lower packaging waste, recyclable cartridges, low-waste toner, and lower energy use. One neat feature is the ability to notice and skip blank pages, saving on both output time and paper use.

For a full review and information on other similar products, see the Better Buys for Business Color Laser Printer & Business Inkjet Guide.

http://www.betterbuys.com/guides/clppp.asp

Copier/printer maker Xerox Corporation announced that it would buy Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) in a $6.4 billion deal. ACS specializes in managing and providing services to IT operations, including those of international corporations and more than 1,700 federal, state, and local governments. The trendy term for what ACS does is “business process outsourcing.”

That’s an area in which Xerox has a growing presence, to the tune of $3 billion a year –- a figure that will be tripled by the acquisition. Indeed, the future of all companies in the copier/printer industry has been to depend less on the diminishing returns from selling “boxes” and work more on selling “solutions,” that is document management and workflows. The move is likely to give Xerox more access to large IT departments where it has been at a disadvantage to heavily entrenched Hewlett-Packard.

The acquisition, Xerox’s largest ever, will more than double its size. It’s also a big risk, one that will add considerably to Xerox’s debt.

But there is some sense that survival may depend on taking such risks. The move is seen as a reaction to two big recent deals: Dell bought IT services company Perot Systems for $3.9 billion last month. HP last year acquired Electronic Data Systems Corp. for $13.2 billion.

The so-called 2600 Profile, developed by Xerox and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), provides a list of specifications for certifying secure printers and multifunctional devices, including:

1. password protection
2. electronic “shredding”
3. hard drive encryption
4. security logs to track users’ activities, and
5. separate connections for fax and network communications.

Says Xerox product security manager Larry Kovnat: “This profile makes it easier for IT departments to identify which products will best meet their security requirements.”

The first product expected to be certified is Xerox’s ColorQube 9200 Series MFP.