LEXMARK COMBINES INKJET & LASER DIVISIONS
Marty
Canning will lead Imaging Solutions and Services, as company courts
outside developers to broaden printer apps.Lexmark International
announced Friday it is combining its two major printing operations —
inkjet and laser — into a single organization to target additional
sales to businesses.
The combination of Lexmark’s Printing
Solutions and Services Division and the Imaging Solutions Division will
be named Imaging Solutions and Services (ISS).The new organization will
be led by Marty Canning as Lexmark executive vice president and
president of ISS. The announcement follows a management shakeup at
Lexmark in which longtime chairman and CEO Paul Curlander will retire
and Paul Rooke was named to lead Lexmark as president and chief
executive.“Lexmark’s strategy of shifting our inkjet technology upstream
to high-usage business customers now offers us the opportunity to
simplify our processes across our R&D, marketing and sales teams
into a single organization, Imaging Solutions and Services,” said Rooke
in a statement. “The combination of the divisions will enable us to
bring more value to customers (and) more consistency to our products.”
The
company, which reported sales of more than $4 billion in 2009, has been
improving its all-in-one devices’ capabilities to print, scan, copy and
fax. It has also fired up its printer apps effort by opening its
Software Development Kit platform to outside software developers so they
can create apps for Lexmark products. The app platform has more than 60
apps developed by Lexmark and its partners, and the company believes a
revenue-sharing plan will attract outside developers to create apps for
the platform.Lexmark said Perceptive Software remains a standalone
operation and will continue to be led by Scott Coons, a Lexmark vice
president. The unit’s products operate easily with many ERP, CRM and
line-of-business applications.