PMA in Australia. Good news or Bad news? Depends on who you ask.

Back in April I did a post about PMA Solutions. based on a piece I found in Print 21online called Be your own business:

PMA Solutions was established by the current Managing Director and primary shareholder, Phil Okill, in 1988 as Print Management Australia. Phil believed that there was an opportunity in the print industry to reverse the traditional focus from production and press capabilities to client requirements and service. Key to this strategy was total independence from any manufacturing capabilities - allowing unbiased supplier selection and the best market rates to be sourced and shared with our clients

After having spent 35 years in the game as a printing broker, it sounds like a print broker on steroids. But then Astron that was purchased by Donnelly for almost a billion dollars started as a printing broker on steroids. Back in the day, printing brokers were at the bottom of the print status ladder. Based on the message I got today from anon, it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same. To be clear, I don't know if anon has this right. No doubt he is saying what he is seeing.

Back in the 80's and 90's, the standard phrase in New York was "sleezy printing broker." True for some, not for the best of us. What is BPO , if not printing brokerage on steroids.

regading this article though it is load of rubish as I allready very well know about PMA and how it operates and it's so called agent division. this new agency sales channel is actually a fraud rather than a bussiness plan dude!. they get the poor peoples there then gather infomations about thier customers and contacts and then get rid of them leaving the people who joined it poorer and worse off than when they have started. please remember O'kill look stupid but he is a real shark and crook !

Why I bought some more XRX today

I have never before seen Xerox answer so quickly, nor open up an shareholder channel like Real Business At Xerox

What's next for Xerox? It's about BPO. But what happens to the PSPs?

Yesterday I followed some links from Document Solutions Daily. Given that when I find interesting(2me), I tweet it. So yesterday I tweeted this:

From a #xerox blog. http://ilnk.me/134 "we are primarily going after the BPO space" So what could that mean for Xerox PSPs? . .

At the click, you will find Real Business At Xerox with a very helpful post by Paul Hartley explaining the thinking behind the ACS purchase. Since I agree with big X on this one, you can take the click to see what Paul wrote. But I do wonder about how this is going to play out for PSP's and the huge installed print capability.

Michael Moeller kindly took the time to answer my question with

To our readers, there will be more details about this acquisition once we satisfy the customary regulatory requirements involved and close the deal. We are focused on providing great value to our customers and meeting our fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders.

We thank you for your attention and input on this blog and look forward to sharing additional information once we can.

All makes sense to me. I'm hoping the response is going to be about connecting the Xerox PSPs to XGS and Independent MPS. It seems to me that would really be 1+1+1 = 10. But I guess we'll have to wait a bit until the lawyers say it's ok to share.

Full disclosure Long Xerox.

A busy morning at twitterschool and Document Solutions Daily is a good value.

#Oce Business Services Ranks No. 1 in 2 of 3 "Most Important Attributes Influencing Client Satisfaction"-The Black Book http://ilnk.me/122

INTERQUEST,announces Digital Printing in Government and Higher Education Forum. http://ilnk.me/121

The State of Printing Associations at PrinCeo http://ilnk.me/11e | 22 comments this am. Adam Dewitz started the thread 9/25. #twitterprint

Hurd Ushers In Change at #HP (HOQ) http://ilnk.me/11d | Printers and PC's with one boss.

Analyst sees little effect on #HP from #Xerox deal http://ilnk.me/11c | Unless IT people & office supply people become the same people.

Some of the tweets got on my radar, by following links I found at Document Solutions Daily.

Association of Retired Xerox Employees Initiate Legal Proceedings Against Xerox Corporation

Don't say that no one saw this coming. Even I did. 1442 posts ago, I questioned the idiot decisions the last administration made around the pension issues.

That was on January 1, 2009. Today this got on my radar.

WEBSTER, N.Y., Sept. 30 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Association of Retired Xerox Employees, Inc. (ARXE) has retained Counsel (Rupp, Baase, Pfalzgraf, Cunningham & Coppola LLC (David R. Pfalzgraf, Jr., Esq., and Danielle Shainbrown, Esq.) and James A. Marino, Esq., (of Counsel)) to institute legal action against Xerox Corporation, in an effort to maintain and restore health care benefits for Xerox employees and retirees.

Beginning in 2010, nearly 25 percent of Xerox retirees will be stripped of supplemental health care coverage, a promised lifetime benefit for all retirees. Xerox employees relied, worked and made retirement decisions based on Xerox's annual guarantees.

ARXE Chairman David Coriale said, "Retirees are in the disturbing and unenviable position of having to initiate litigation against their former employer to preserve the benefits promised to them for their lifetime of work.

After buying ACS, it's going to be interesting hearing what the Xerox lawyers think they are going to say in court. it would have been so much less expensive to fix this a long time ago than what it's going to cost to fix this now.

If I were still in the game, here's how I would use twitter to get to selling Print

Mingoville @ToughLoveforX what do you mean with POD?

ToughLoveforX @Mingoville POD is the acronym used in the print industry to point to "print on demand." Print can now use data streams as input.

Mingoville @ToughLoveforX reg. POD:does that mean ordering 5 copies is just as cheap as ordering 500?

ToughLoveforX @Mingoville. It means you can order as few as 1 copy at an affordable price. Or 500 copies with the words different in each copy.

ToughLoveforX @Mingoville. It also means you can publish a data stream in Print for 30 copies for a class. There's more in the sidebar @ http://ilnk.me/cf10:1
10:18 AM Sep 28th from web

This tweet is the end of stage 1:

Mingoville Thx I'll check it out RT @ToughLoveforX: Data stream print @ http://ilnk.me/cf

What will Xerox do? Beats me, but keep your eye on the independents.

With yesterday's announcement Xerox is revealing what the last few years have been about.

It's clear that the global growth market is in Managed Print Services. Also called Business Process Outsourcing. At the top, in the natural English countries we now have HP + EDS , Xerox + ACS and Donnelly + Astron. Dell + Perot Systems may turn out be a fourth player.

The real challenge, however, is going to come from the independents
The independents have the advantage of speed and granular knowledge of local conditions. They also have the entrepreneurial dna that drives adoption at real life speeds. In a world where the margins on boxes will keep being squeezed, they have what might turn to be there greatest advantage in being able to easily choose the best and ignore the rest.

Rioch, Cannon and the other Japanese globals are the titans of OEM. Now that the new Prime Minister has made it clear that the yen will move to it's natural level, it's likely that their resources can be more strategically used to either wage a long war or purchase whatever pieces they need. Given the rush to BRIC I have to believe they will be forced to move much faster than previously.

The Japanese titans are the source of power for the independents.

My question concerns whether Xerox and HP will be able to get actionable intelligence to be able to take advantage of the gezillion opportunities that will be open for only a couple of years.

The most natural(2me) way for the whole thing to evolve is Xerox, HP and Donnelly for the Globals. The independents for everyone else.

Where are commercial printers going to wind up?
It's still unclear(2me). But it seems likely that it's going to be the franchises and big box retailers to be the customer facing piece with print manufacturers doing the work in the background. The real challenge there will come again from the independents. PSDA seems to be the "strange attractor" for the ferocious activity in that space.

Added: 8.08 AM EDT from Bloomberg http://ilnk.me/eb

The money quote for me.

ACS is the U.S.’s biggest student-loan processor and operates the E-ZPass toll-collection system.

This could turn out to be a problem for Oce and other OEM that output for those industries.

Xerox’s acquisition will help triple the amount of revenue it gets from services, reaching about $10 billion, the Norwalk, Connecticut-based company said yesterday. Affiliated Computer, based in Dallas, helps customers outsource tasks such as human- resources management. It’s also the U.S.’s biggest student-loan processor and operates the E-ZPass toll-collection system.

The total business-process outsourcing market is valued at about $150 billion, Xerox said yesterday. Almost 90 percent of Affiliated Computer’s new business contracts came from outsourcing last year. The big challenge for Xerox will be fitting the pieces together, said Keith Bachman, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets in New York. That’s left investors uncertain about the deal.

Xippa says these folks have their priorities in the right place. Saving on Copiers to afford Teachers.

SAUGUS-Superintendent Richard Langlois is excited but he is also just about broke.

Langlois has managed to put foreign languages back into the middle school, art and music back in the elementary schools and reduce class sizes at the middle school but it’s not without risk.

"Ripen said he has the money from savings on copier leases and other line items."

Read the full story at ItemLive.com

Big move for Big X: $6.4 Billion to buy Affiliated Computers. MPS BPO

Go Ursala!

Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Xerox Corp. agreed to buy Affiliated Computer Services Inc. for $6.4 billion in its biggest purchase, shifting to computer services as sales of its traditional printing equipment decline.

The transaction will help triple sales from services to about $10 billion, Xerox said today in a statement. The total price of the cash-and-stock deal is about 34 percent more than Dallas-based Affiliated Computer’s closing price Sept. 25.

The acquisition is Chief Executive Officer Ursula Burns’s first since taking over the world’s largest maker of high-speed color printers in July. The transaction helps her expand into a market the company values at about $150 billion and gives her a foothold in managing administrative operations for multiple arms of the U.S. government.

Is it good news or bad news for XRX?
I buy and hold so it's just a matter of time(2me). In any case it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

ColorQube is the solid ink competition to inkjet as toner levels off . The recent sales in MPS coming out of the UK and Canada sound good. The continued improvement in the black toner Nuvera series seem just right in a world where margins on color keep getting tighter.

If X can learn to focus, instead of being lulled by their legacy brand, it should work out fine.

The Rules for Selling Print in tweets-on-paper instead of news-on-paper