infoTECH Feature

March 20, 2015

Comings & Goings: Anurag Gupta Appointed Director Customer Service Operations for Xerox India

Xerox announced recently that Anurag Gupta had been appointed Director Customer Service Operations for Xerox India (XI). Gupta, who has been with XI nearly 30 years, was previously the head of field service operations for the company.

Gupta’s appointment is at the tail end of a series of position changes at XI. He replaces Balaji Rajagopalan, who was appointed executive director technology channels & international distributor operations back in September. Rajagopalan replaces Vipin Tuteja, who left XI in August to become vice president-enterprise business for Samsung (News - Alert).

Gurgaon, India-based XI is a subsidiary of Norwalk, Conn.-based Xerox Corporation. Known historically for its printing and copying business, Xerox has found India to be a growth market, according to a June 2014 article in The Hindu Business Line. Rajat Jain, managing director for XI, told the publication that billions of pages of paper are printed each year in India. The market is growing about 5-10 percent annually and the growing customer preference is not to purchase machines, but to instead purchase service on a pay per page plan.

This is in stark contrast to the Western market, where according to ZDNet, the printing business is going downhill for Xerox. Green initiatives and offices reducing paper consumption, if not going entirely paperless, have reduced the demand for printing or photocopying in the region.

For a company whose name was once used as a generic term for photocopying, Xerox will have to change its identity to recover from its slump. The company has tried several things like making greener products, entering the healthcare industry and attempting to improve imaging technology, but these have had little effect in causing a turnaround.

Several years ago, Xerox purchased Affiliated Computer Services (News - Alert) (ACS), which provided back-end processing for the insurance and airline industries. This move in IT may end up saving Xerox in the long run; ACS activity is expected to account for two-thirds of the company’s earnings by 2017.

A dichotomy exists between Xerox corporate headquarters and XI. Gupta and Rajagopalan will help XI move forward in India as the subsidiary pushes an apparently lucrative pay per page printing and photocopying service. Xerox corporate office will not push those services, but instead put more effort into becoming an IT provider. 




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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