ENGINEERING

With businesses of all sizes looking at every part of their IT infrastructure to find cost savings, managed print services (MPS) has emerged as a new opportunity to improve overall productivity and reduce operational costs by an estimated 30 percent. As more and more organizations sign on for Xerox's market-leading MPS offering, they benefit from faster access to information about their global print operations -- delivered by the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) and data center infrastructure, which supports hundreds of thousands of transactions per second on behalf of Xerox.

Last year Cisco and Xerox formed an alliance to deliver cloud-based services and technology solutions that combine network intelligence and print, and today, Xerox uses Cisco data center solutions so its global delivery centers can meet the fast-growing demand for cloud-based MPS. The Cisco data center environment gives Xerox's global MPS offerings room to expand by providing a smaller footprint that also saves power and meets cooling requirements.

To support the double-digit growth predicted for the MPS market year-over-year, Xerox's global network of MPS delivery centers hosts a suite of more than 100 applications, including ticketing systems, help desk, inventory, and financial reporting. The volume of performance data generated is massive, highlighting everything from print usage and performance trends, to equipment maintenance requirements and other critical issues. The compilation and analysis of Big Data, hosted on the Cisco data center infrastructure, allows Xerox to continually refine its services while providing valuable information to customers to help simplify and improve print resources and costs.

Xerox also works with Cisco to deliver cloud services using the Vblock platform, which combines Cisco UCS with EMC storage and VMware for virtualization, as well as Cisco Intelligent Automation software, to deliver Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud capabilities and Cisco Hosted Collaboration services. Xerox Cloud Services support clients of all sizes from facilities in the U.S., UK and Kuala Lumpur, and use Cisco Hosted Collaboration Services to provide a range of advanced communication and collaboration services, including integrating IP Telephony, single number reach, instant messaging. In the future, the offering will incorporate Cisco Jabber and Cisco WebEx solutions.