BOULDER - Meet the new printer company, similar to the old printer company.

InfoPrint Solutions Company has the same employees, executives and headquarters as its previous incarnation, IBM Printing Systems. It makes the same products and provides the same services as it did under IBM.

What's different is the ownership and vision.

In June, Boulder-based IBM Printing Systems joined forces with Tokyo, Japan-based Ricoh to form a new, privately held company.

Ricoh, which paid IBM $725 million for the division, owns 51 percent of the joint venture. During the next three years Ricoh will gradually come to own the entire company. IBM and Ricoh had been strategic partners for 20 years.

InfoPrint employs about 1,200 worldwide, about 550 of whom are based in the Boulder headquarters. Another 1,000 workers will be added to perform maintenance on customers' machines, but since most of them are in the field it's unlikely any will join the Boulder staff, said Jeff Paterra, senior vice president and general manager of technology and solutions development - the same job and title he had at IBM Printing Systems.

Although the company's business lines - developing, manufacturing and marketing printers along with the software that runs them and providing professional services around its customers' printing needs - remain the same, the new ownership structure will allow it to grow in ways it couldn't while a part of IBM, Paterra said.

"One of the key goals that we have is to grow this business beyond what we did previously. That is a significant change, and with that initiative of growth comes the additional investment in research and development, sales and marketing, and the opportunity to grow resources," he said.

On July 26, within two months of launching as a new company, InfoPrint announced several new office color laser printers: InfoPrint Color 1767, which has a 1.25 gigahertz processor and can hold up to 512 megabytes of memory; InfoPrint Color 1764, which has an M40 MFP option that allows users to scan, copy, fax and e-mail documents; and InfoPrint Color 1754 Express, a more affordable version with a 800 megahertz processor and 256 MB of memory.

InfoPrint is hiring in Boulder. Paterra could not state the exact number of new hires, but said it would be "fairly significant."

The company occupies about three buildings on the IBM Boulder campus, where the executive offices, research and development, sales and marketing, operations and maintenance operations are housed. There is a small sales and maintenance office in Japan.

InfoPrint's printers range from general office printers that fit on a desktop and go for several thousand dollars to 2,500-pound production printers costing between $800,000 and $1 million. The company doesn't address the consumer printer market.

Manufacturing and integration is done in Endicott, N.Y. InfoPrint develops the printers' control units - the drivers and print management software that makes the printers run - and uses print engines - the part of the printer that actually prints - provided by original equipment manufacturers, including Ricoh, Paterra said.

Professional services comes into play when customers need an end-to-end "print workflow management" solution, he said.

For example, companies that print statements and bills print millions of unique documents each month. The printing process starts with the data that's unique to each customer being formatted and printed, and the end of the process is getting that statement inserted into an envelope and mailed to the customer's home.

"It's important to know that every document was printed and ready for delivery," Paterra said. "If there are any steps along the way where there's a jam in the printer or the inserter or the sorter, we can track each document at each step along the way, so we can reprint them as necessary."

InfoPrint consultants develop solutions that "help reduce the cost of operations and increase efficiency," Paterra said. "Whether it's a bill or a bank statement, you want to receive that. If you don't receive that, you're likely to place a call. The end-user truly views that as a critical document."

Right now Paterra can't see far enough into the future to know what InfoPrint will be like in three years when it's completely owned by Ricoh, for example, whether Ricoh would want to take the company public. "We are focused on getting the business off the ground," he said. "It's a three-year joint venture period ahead of us, and we haven't addressed whether that's a future possibility or not."

Contact Caron Schwartz Ellis at 303-440-4950 or csellis@bcbr.com.