Ramesh Ratan Speaks with OutputLinks About His 1st year at Pitney Bowes
Andy & Julie Plata, OutputLinks’ owners, recently met with Ramesh Lakshmi-Ratan to discuss his first year at Pitney Bowes and as president of the Document Messaging Technologies (DMT) division.
The 1st installment of a 3-part series.
Greetings Ramesh. In your January 2010 OutputLinks Entrepreneurial Spirit Interview you were a brand new Pitney Bowes employee and the new president of the Document Messaging Technologies division. Can you share with us how the past year progressed for you and the business?
Andy & Julie thank you for this opportunity. It has been a great year. As I shared before, I came to Pitney Bowes because I was phenomenally excited by what I felt was the world’s best business opportunity.
My excitement was based upon Pitney Bowes’ incredible collection of businesses and assets coupled with Document Messaging Technologies being at the center of it and stitching together the future of what I call “hybrid physical digital communication infrastructure solutions.” I personally felt that this “hybrid physical digital communication infrastructure solutions” was the direction that all businesses were headed in terms of how they spend their marketing and customer communications dollars.
How has the past year gone?
I am now even more convinced that it is absolutely true. I think in the past year, we as a company have made very significant progress in that direction. We have focused our company on Customer Communications Management solutions or what we call CCM.
We believe that we are unique in terms of the collection and portfolio of assets we have across the company. A good example is our software business, Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI), with capabilities in data, analytics, customer intelligence, profiling, segmentation, and targeting. We added multi-channel campaign management to our PBBI offerings with the recent acquisition of Portrait Software.
When you add all this up, we have done incredibly amazing things in terms of new innovations in the digital print space. And there is more to come!
The HP - Pitney Bowes partnership for high volume printers was just launching when you joined the company. How has that progressed?
It has gone very well and we are expanding our customer reach across the globe. We started our HP partnership with one printer, the IntelliJet™ 30 Printing System and we have since added the IntelliJet™ 20 Printing System as well as a number of important speed and width innovations to serve the needs of our customers. Between our two companies, we have placed over 20 printing systems (40 engines) around the globe and are rapidly establishing a leadership position in the very high volume print marketplace.
Our Print+ Messenger™ system is another example of how our HP partnership can create powerful solutions for our customers. Pitney Bowes inserters can be equipped to generate high speed, full color personalized content directly onto the envelopes. Messages and images can be matched to the content on the document inside. We have had amazing success in early customer trials in the US and Europe.
The combination of Pitney Bowes IntelliJet™ printing systems, inserting systems and Production Intelligence® workflow systems drive new opportunities for our customers to tightly link their print and mail operations. Customers tell us that they are excited about how tightly integration of print and mail processes can help them lower operating expenses and generate more powerful, valuable customer communications.
It sounds like you feel the dreams and goals you discussed with us last year are coming to fruition.
Over the past year we have made significant progress in realizing this vision of the seamless end-to-end customer communications solutions infrastructure. Our innovations in the analytics space, our core inserter space, and in the digital printing space as well as the innovations acquired with Portrait Software all contribute to that progress.
Ramesh, thank you very much for sharing your thoughts, experiences and wisdom with our OutputLinks global community.
Join us over the next 2 weeks for the full interview where Ramesh discusses how the changes Pitney Bowes has commanded have and will affect their customers. And please let us know if you have recommendations for additional questions you would like us to include in our future interviews.
Andy & Julie Plata
PLATAS@OutputLinks.com