Important Industry Update!

Last week Xerox made a strategic corporate decision to end their development and production of new wide-format equipment effective immediately and will stop selling these products once their inventory has been depleted, which should be sometime within the 3rd or 4th quarter of 2011.This decision has understandably generated some legitimate questions and concerns to the thousands of Xerox wide format equipment users who count on their systems to get the job done every day. In light of this announcement, we wanted to address a few of the more common questions and concerns.

First and foremost you can rest assured that Metro-Repro will continue to support all of the active annual maintenance agreements we currently have on your Xerox systems and will continue to offer renewals on these contracts for as long as parts support remains available. Xerox’s announcement made it quite clear that – while they may no longer be producing new wide format equipment options – the technical and parts support for all current production models will remain intact and uninterrupted for AT LEAST an additional five years from the date the last current inventory unit is sold and shipped. In essence, this decision by Xerox will have no effect on the level of service and support you currently receive on your equipment. As long as there are parts and technical support available, you will be able to continue to count on Metro-Repro to provide your company with the superior level of customer service, support, and value you have come to expect from us.

What about those customers utilizing older Xerox models that are no longer produced? For those with older “legacy” products from Xerox that are no longer in production, but are still supported by Metro-Repro and Xerox, those products will also continue to be supported for a period of five years from the time the last unit was shipped from Xerox. Those legacy products that have not been manufactured by Xerox for at least 5 years, but are still currently supported by Metro-Repro and Xerox, Xerox will continue to assess its support of these products on a yearly basis. Should a decision be made to discontinue support you can generally count on at least 12 months warning, which allows for ample time to react accordingly. Certainly there have been some significant advancements in technology over the past few years and many of today’s solutions offer very real operational cost savings and with eye-popping improvements in output quality! However, it will continue to be Metro-Repro’s policy to support your equipment and provide value-added annual maintenance agreements for as long as we can source critical parts inventory – be it through Xerox, third-party parts manufacturers, or our own used parts reclamation efforts from trade-in systems. (Hopefully until the time you are ready to explore alternatives!) If you are happy with your current system (regardless of its age!) Metro-Repro stands ready to support it for as long possible.

The next concern would pertain to those current Xerox customers who happen to have aging equipment, or those companies with Xerox equipment that no longer satisfies their current needs and who might be looking to upgrade into a new equipment option. Xerox’s current lineup of 5-Star BERTL rated equipment is still in inventory and available, though Xerox expects this inventory to be depleted probably sometime between the 3rd and 4th Quarter of 2011. Again, these inventory systems will have the full factory warranties, parts, and technical support as has been the case for the previous decades of Xerox’s wide format offerings. Therefore there are no real “buyer beware” fears that should prevent you from considering any of these options. However, Metro-Repro will also be performing its due diligence to assess the current systems available in the market and eventually moving forward with a revamped product portfolio that will – as always – offer the best system solutions available to meet the technology and budgetary needs of our customers. Capabilities, ease-of-use, reliability, operational costs, technical support – these and many other factors come into play as we assess the equipment alternatives we will ultimately recommend to our customers. You have come to depend on Metro-Repro to provide its expertise in recommending only the best, and you also can count on the fact that if we sell it, we’ll be supporting it the same way we always have – service and support that is above-and-beyond! Stay tuned to our website as we incorporate new solutions to our product portfolio.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any of your questions. We can always be reached at (Toll Free) 888-484-9292, or feel free to email me at LHelsen@metrorepro.com

Louis B. Helsen, III
President
Metro-Repro, Inc.
LHelsen@metrorepro.com
(Toll Free) 888-484-9292