Andy & Julie Plata's Industry Notes:
Pitney Bowes 2010 Customer Summit

1ntegrate

September 13, 14, 15, 2010

Danbury and Shelton CT

By Andy & Julie Plata, OutputLinks

Pitney Bowes Document Messaging Technologies (DMT) annual Customer Summit took place this September 13 -15 and, by all measures, it was a great success.

“Mi casa es su casa” was the greeting from Pitney Bowes DMT’s President, Dr. Ramesh Ratan. It was his first Customer Summit since joining the company last year and his warm "my home is your home" greeting characterized the “Integrate” theme of the event.

During the Summit’s three days, Pitney Bowes shared its homes in Danbury and Shelton Connecticut as well as its technology, accomplishments, innovations, future goals and people with the nearly 200 guests from around the world. We were impressed that every division of Pitney Bowes had representatives in attendance, and that DMT’s senior management was present throughout the event.

Here is a nice photo stream of the event.

The Summit Agenda focused on the integration of DMT’s impressive technology and workflow arsenal which includes:

·         One of the world’s fastest and widest color digital printers;

·         All inclusive large scale disaster recovery for print and mail operations;

·         Impressive Customer Innovation Center for application development and testing;

·         Awesome fail-safe, super-fast, postal and mailing technology;

·         Integrated document, mailstream, and business intelligence software;

·         A new web-based portal that analyzes and optimizes print streams for fast to market transpromo initiatives (Note *We will go into more detail on this in later writings)

As impressive as the technology was, what most impressed us was the demonstrated transformation of DMT from a hardware focused business to a powerful marketing communications innovator.

Much of what we saw in relation to the enhanced marketing focus seemed to be directly related to remarks we heard from Dr. Ratan when we interviewed him last year just a few weeks after he joined Pitney Bowes. Prior to Pitney Bowes, Ramesh was the Direct Marketing Association’s Chief Operating Officer where he still serves on the Global Advisory Board. So his comments during the interview were grounded in his real-world marketing experiences. Let us share a few with you:

·         (There is a) move from traditional mail to an integrated multi-channel transactional communication marketplace, which is more marketing-driven and application-driven.

·         If you think you are in print, you really need to realize you are in the communication enablement business.

·         DMT is in the exact center of the high growth space of the marketing industry.

·         Pitney Bowes is going to transform the marketing industry.

This marketing focus from a print and mail technology leader like Pitney Bowes will be an answer to prayer for business people trying to achieve their Key Business Objectives which are how to:

1.     Make, Save $;

2.     Gain, Retain, Grow Clients.

Professionals will now have a new partner at the C-table to help them meet and exceed their Key Business Objectives.

This expanded marketing focus was evident in almost all of the presentations we attended. We also noticed more marketing oriented attendees than at past to Pitney Bowes customer events. There was even one entire tract devoted to marketing where representatives from Portrait Software, PB's newest acquisition, spoke. Portrait’s technology for delivering real-time customer interactions to communicate the right message through the right channel, at the right time is one more example of Pitney Bowes as an integrated marketing communications company.

Pitney Bowes introduced the White Paper Factory concept which was a key part of the Customer Summit.  It included an end-to-end demonstration of a transpromo application printed in full-color on the Pitney Bowes IntelliJet 30 Printing System using plain white paper.  Then during the mail finishing process, targeted marketing messages and logos were printed, using HP technology, on the outside of the envelope in-line on the Pitney Bowes Mailstream Productivity Series inserter.

The Pitney Bowes and HP partnership was a definite highlight with HP providing a very strong color presentation to one of the general sessions.

Now that the partnership has now been extended to include the IntelliJet 20, we wonder what the next step in this growing Pitney Bowes and HP relationship might bring (Any ideas? Let us know).

It was evident from the event that Pitney Bowes has not been sitting on the sidelines during the past economic slowdown. The new technologies, partnerships, acquisitions and marketing focus were proof of PB's continued economic strength and long term commitment to its clients and technology.

As we said in the beginning, by all accounts the Summit was a success. Pitney Bowes demonstrated its capability to integrate print and mail with their production and business intelligence technologies to meet the Key Business Objectives of its customers.

Andy & Julie

Questions to ponder:

1. Which leading mailers are using the transactional statement to grow their business?
2. What is a missing component in the Pitney Bowes technology arsenal?
3. What company will Pitney Bowes acquire next?
4. What will the next step in the Pitney Bowes / HP partnership be?
5. What part of integrated marketing communications offers the greatest growth opportunity?

Share your thoughts and let’s ponder together. >>>