Early this year IBM announced that it had reached a deal with Ricoh to jointly run the IBM Printing Systems operation, which has been named InfoPrint Printing Solutions. initially Ricoh owns 51% of the business but will progressively take over the rest, owning it completely in June 2010. Phil Self has been appointed managing director of InfoPrint Printing Solutions UK. Formerly he ran Printing Systems for IBM in the UK, and for the time being he’s still based at the same office in Winchester. This is a major venture for Ricoh, which is on an expansion roll. The only surprise was that it took so long. It’s been common knowledge for years that IBM wanted to offload Printing Systems. Ricoh already made the high speed reel-fed laser printing engines for IBM’s flagship InfoPrint 4000/4100 line – these were originally made by Hitachi, which Ricoh acquired. IBM added value with its own software, its legendarily efficient service and support, and logistics such as consumables.

Phil Self: “Weare adding about $1 bn to Ricoh.”

Although IBM Printing Systems has been a bit lowkey in recent years, it’s nevertheless a huge and significant presence in enterprise-level digital printing. “We are adding about $1 billion revenue to Ricoh,” Self says. “This is the first time IBM has revealed such figures. So it will take Ricoh from about $17 billion to $18 bn pa, which is a significant amount for them. IBM is a $100 bn company in total, which is why printing wasn’t such a big thing for them.

“Ricoh wanted to expand into high end production print. IBM decided to divest the business, which hasn’t had as much investment as it should have for some years. Printing wasn’t top of IBM’s strategies, but it’s one of Ricoh’s priorities, so a deal was struck. Ricoh is far better known in other parts of the world than the UK, where it’s basically known for office copiers.”

It’s a complex handover because Printing Systems was previously integral in IBM’s huge global finance, service and support organisation. Infoprint now has a core of management in place in several countries, including the UK. All the IBM Printing Systems staff, some 1,200 worldwide, have now been transferred to InfoPrint Solutions. Over the first year another 1,000 IBM maintenance engineers will also transfer – Self says that about 85 of them are in the UK. “This will give closer integration between sales, pre-sales, maintenance and installation,” he says. “We’ve also got a substantial and successful professional services team, with ten people in the UK. The back end – finance, call centres, service and so on, is still outsourced to IBM for the present.”

IBM has had an interest in printing for more than 40 years. It progressed from dot matrix and strike-on printers to lasers early on in the 1970s and then developed a desktop laser printer and inkjet business, ultimately spun off to become Lexmark.

IBM made some of its own printers, but bought in others. Its main interest was in developing its own print software and controller technology. Its AFP architecture grew to dominate enterprise level printing, a position it still occupies now. IBM published it as an open standard last year for the first time.

Infoprint/IBM’s users have always been mainly in transaction and big corporate work. In the 1990s book printers started adopting the Infoprint 4000 high speed duplex laser print lines for on-demand work. This led to IBM’s adoption of PostScript. As the need for colour printing grew, IBM added Xeikon reel-fed digital colour printers to its range for a few years, though it doesn’t sell them now. It also struck an OEM deal with Nexpress to sell its sheet-fed mono production printers.

Last year IBM announced a deal with Dainippon Screen to sell the new Truepress Jet520 52 cm reel-fed high speed inkjet colour production press. It’ll be called Infoprint 5000, distinguished by a black casing and its own controllers. Deliveries haven’t started yet but we’ve seen print samples, whose quality is hugely improved over what Screen printed at the Ipex show last year.

Some of the Ricoh office and production printers are also now being given the Infoprint name. However Self says that Infotech, the former Danka printer sales and support company recently acquired by Ricoh, won’t sell the high end Infoprint systems.

He is confident that Infoprint will be able to regain the vigour that IBM Printing Systems was showing in the 1990s, concluding that “With Ricoh in charge, printing is the head of the dog, not the tail!”

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