Abby Abhyankar

Competition among the major digital color printing vendors is tougher than ever. In-plants, as luck would have it, are caught in the crossfire. by Mike Llewellyn FOR ANY large organization, if they're saying 'I need this job now,' they're going to want to send it to an in-plant," declares Abby Abhyankar, vice president for integrated marketing at Xerox. "In-plants represent short runs with fast response times and no compromises on quality." That's not news to in-plant managers, whose job it is to make sure their shops offer the highest speed at the lowest price. But it is making headlines at companies like

Back in October 2002, Canon USA released its CLC 3900 (now 3900+), a copier/printer turning out 39 pages per minute (ppm) in either color or black and white. The 3900 is a slightly-less-robust addition to a product line that includes Canon's CLC 5000, a production-level copier/printer producing 50 ppm. At the time, Mason Olds, the company's then-general manager for the color systems division, claimed, "This product has no direct competition right now." Jump to February, 2003: Xerox goes head-to-head with Canon with the release of the Xerox 3535, pushing 35 ppm in either black and white or color. Until that late-winter release, Canon