 Okay, we're back inside theCUBE at SiliconANGLE.tv's exclusive coverage of HP Discover 2012. This is SiliconANGLE.tv's theCUBE, our flagship telecast. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and I'm joined with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org and we're here with Ron Coglin, who's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the LaserJet and Enterprise Solutions Group within HP, PPS. Ron, welcome to theCUBE. Great to be here, thanks. So, John, you know, this is back. It reminds me of the day. John, you're very excited for this segment, I know. You were there in the heyday when... So I feel this is like a very emotional midlife crisis going through for me right now because we just had Kirk on who was PA risk back in the day when I worked at HP and then I was just telling the story when I moved into the dealer channel in 1989 and it was all about the LaserJet. LaserJet made the company. In fact, I wrote a blog post a couple months ago saying that the LaserJet saved HP from the potential death of what Digital Equipment Corporation was going down to. So it really saved the company, created a lot of revenue for the company, spawned the desk check with Rick Beluzo back in the day. Because you were selling sugar water back then. And this is true. So, but still, it's still the standard, still the gold standard in printing. Tell us, you know, as networks come on, as you have all this new tech, what's going on with the LaserJet Group? Yeah, well, first of all, LaserJet is still a growth business for us. It's one of the best brands in the industry. But one of the things we're seeing is LaserJet's aren't just for printing anymore, not just for copying, but they're on ramps to the information management world. So what we're increasingly doing is turning these LaserJets onto on ramps to information management. So you'll see very interesting things from autonomy where we do document management with our MFPs and we converge where we help people take their documents to the cloud, store, retrieve those documents. So you're seeing these things become a really the entree into the... So you said, does that mean you're bolting on a computer basically inside the LaserJet or is it more the peripheral to a back end system? How would you guys look at that product? Yeah, it's more the front end to a cloud system. So everything would be in the cloud, but you'd be able to access it. And it really becomes the business hub. Because what you're seeing in the printing business is a consolidation to MFPs, multifunction printers. So we all used to have that printer on the side of our desk, right, a personal printer. Now you're seeing them in the aisles. And what we see is them being access points to information to pull down information as well as to put your information up into the cloud. I mean, you guys, I mean, HP's well known for creating the multifunction peripheral office jet, desk jet, now the LaserJet. And this whole document management is a cutting edge trend. In fact, Obama's got a $20 billion earmark fund for in healthcare to get documents online and get them managed. So the trend is definitely there. What's a corporation's current status? Is it a compliance driver? Is it more of green? All of the above, what is the key driver from the business case to go to these kinds of information management peripherals? It's really to make sure that you can efficiently store your information, access your information. And I think because of the MFP capability, because the MFPs are on the network, they become tools to information management. They used to be just, as I said, used to print or to copy. But now they're tools to the flow of information. And I think that's really, you talked about a midlife crisis. This is the grown up version of your LaserJet. Last year, you guys talked a lot about this sort of the printer becoming actually this, what I would call a consumer device. You know, mobile enabled, wireless enabled. Talk about that trend and where you're taking that. Well, if you look at great examples when the tablets were launched, the number one dissatisfier to the iPad was actually inability to print. It wasn't residents in the initial iPad. So as folks become mobile, they want to print. So what we're doing is enabling them with ePrint to print whether it's from a phone, whether it's from a tablet, whether it's wireless, making sure that we can print mobile-ly and now access information mobile-ly as well. We were at Sapphire a couple of weeks ago, three weeks ago actually, John. And Paul McDermott, the CEO, was telling a story about how they bought like 3,000 iPads inside of SAP. And Steve Jobs actually called Bill McDermott personally and said, but why are you doing that? It doesn't print. And so he said, that's okay, you know, we'll get around that. So maybe you should call Bill McDermott and see if you guys can work a deal. There's been a lot of cloud-based print stuff. Google announced Google print. There doesn't really have any legs, but they are obviously going with the developers. What are you guys doing with regard to expanding out the solution set into the developer community? Well, you know what's one thing that's interesting? People talk about print. Some people theorize that it's losing momentum. What's interesting is as the technology evolves, whether it's Google, whether it's Apple, whether it's the PC side of the HP, everybody realizes you have to have print enablement if you want to be a viable office product. So we're making sure that we enable printing, whether it's on new mobile devices, whether it's on new cloud architectures. We're making sure that we enable that. And we've done that with Google, we've done it with Apple, we've done it with Android across all the platforms. Does it change the business model a little bit? I mean, we were just at actually earlier in the week at IBM Edge, which is a storage event, and you know, they're box pushers in that little vertical, but they're expanding now to a solution cell. I see laser jets as per device basis to the channel. But is this paradigm of being a front end to information management change the business model? I'll give you two great examples. We have something called E-Print, and we announced deals with both FedEx and UPS on E-Print. And they're printing, people can print from their mobile devices to a UPS location. Truth be told today, a lot of those aren't HP devices, but HP is making money on that transaction, so it is a new business model. Another example I'd cite is we have an asset called Extreme Software. Extreme enables you, for example, to have a customized American Express bill. But you might get your American Express bill in paper form, you might get your American Express bill emailed to you. Guess what? HP is making money on either of those transactions. So we're making sure whether it is a printed document or a digital document, that enablement. So the new business model, or the enhancement to your revenue model or business model is that the fact that the preferred user experience is changing. In the end, the device is not a physical device per se. So mobility is a great example. Real-time behavior, hey, I'm walking down the street, downtown Palo Alto, I want to print something, I know there's a UPS store, I can pop there. That's what you're saying. Well, we bought Extreme because it was variable data to printers, right? But two short years, or three years after we bought it, now we do multi-channel. So any way that American Express or any other customer wants to disseminate their information, we enable. So can you talk about the channel a little bit more and how that's changing in this world? When you mentioned FedEx, that's a channel of distribution. How is the channel transforming? I think this is going to be one of the more interesting dynamics. Our channel partners realize they need to go up the stack. But a lot of them grew up selling toner or grew up selling printers. And that is a hard transformation for you coming from HP history, you know this. And what's interesting is there's a channel partner who is their office supplies. And he'll fill the coffee beans, the cups, as well as toner. You wouldn't think that company could get into solution selling. Guess what? We're helping them get into solution selling. So whether it is somebody who grew up in that type of environment, or somebody who already sells HP software, Oracle software, whatever, we're going to help provide them. I think that's a smart solution. I think I just gave a speech yesterday around the convergence of how the portfolio solutions are changing, and that ultimately the user experience is driving everything, right, and the expectation. And I think you guys are on a good path there. The question is how that will translate into more revenue. So it sounds like you've got two channels, really, the physical product through the normal blocking and tackling printer. And then now these new cloud channels. So how do you guys handle that on the partnership? What's your plan going forward for next year? Yeah, well, yes, there will be parts that are distinct. But I think where we're going to really help our customers and where we'll really tap into the HP muscle is when we can bring those things together. So what you'll see more of is things like our e-print service that comes baked into our consumer and micro printers. You'll see more MFPs with autonomy capabilities built in so that it comes inherently back. Can you talk about the autonomy integration, how that's affected your group? So we haven't announced it yet. So you'll see that's coming soon to a theater near you. And with a smile on your face. Okay. And also we want to put a shout out to Tara Egan, who, friends of ours, works for you. Congratulations to have her on board. Tara's a great woman. Outside of that, what other things are you seeing on the radar for you that are disruptive enablers for the multifunction peripheral business? Yep. So the shift to multifunction printers first, from more from single function to multifunction, the shift to color, that allows us to help our customers with more functionality as well as generate more pages, higher value pages for us. Secondly, the shift to services. The majority of the growth of the printing industry is going to come via service offering, a managed print service offering a contract with that customer where basically they're outsourcing their print to us. And then third, once you have that service, what we find is if we're in there managing their printing environment, they say, hey, can you help me with this workflow? Can you help me with this security problem related to documents or anything that's a document intensive process, they're coming to us and saying, help us with that. And we're increasingly doing that. My final question is, Ron, is HB's always been green going back to the boxes back in the day. And printers kind of get a bad rap because it's like, you know, you're killing dead trees because there's paper, right, involved in printing. What's your green strategy going forward? And obviously the toner is as well-documented. You guys have done a great job with recycling and whatnot. What's the green strategy for around the consumables in the printer market? So first, our printers are the most energy efficient. We have what's called Instant Ons. Our printers, when they're not used, actually go into sleep mode. And so they're not using, they're using 10% of their power when they're in sleep mode. We're the only company that does that. So we make sure that our printers are the most energy efficient. Second, as you said, we have take-back programs. And third, we help customers manage their usage of paper, things like duplexing, reduced paper usage. So it's, you know, there's a reason HP was recognized as one of the top two greenest companies in the world. And we think the printing business is a contributor to that. It's a great business. We had Scott McNeely on theCUBE at EMC World. And he said he wanted the printer business. I interviewed Scott many years ago. And I said, he was trashing HP about some UNIX market shares. I said, you just have printer envy. He said, no, I have ink envy. So that was one of his classic lines. But it's been a great business for you guys. Absolutely. We're on Confidence VP GM of the LaserJet Group. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We appreciate it. And we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.