Nicholas Richards, Gleaner Writer
Managing director of XSOMO Desmond Valentine.
MOORE BUSINESS Forms Caribbean Limited has officially changed its name to XSOMO International Limited to better reflect its changed nature.
Managing director Desmond Valentine, said this was more than a rebranding exercise, as the name change is in keeping with their improving technology and increasing services brought on by the shifting demands of their customers.
"We had to move from just the printing business, which in essence meant that we would slowly die, to embracing technology and survive in the future," said Valentine.
Jamaica's top maker of business forms, Moore, three years ago established a new division, MooreTech, to handle its new high technology opportunities. Located at 58 Half-Way Tree Road in St. Andrew, it is physically separated from the company's main office located at 29 Slipe Pen Road in the rougher western district of Kingston.
REBRANDING
The rebranding goes further, representing the public acknowledgement of the new direction Moore is taking.
"We had to do this (change)," Mr. Valentine said. "There was no way that the technology was going to wait on us, so we had to embrace it if we were going to survive in this competitive market."
He was addressing an audience at the company's official rebranding on Tuesday at the Hilton Kingston Hotel in Jamaica.
Formed in 1968, the company manufactured business forms for government and private sector organisations, with a focus on utility companies and financial entities.
However, over the years they have been modernising their services, and since 1998 have been solving the overall
information management needs of government and private sector organisations, by managing data from information captured through archiving, storage, retrieval and workflow management.
A key development for XSOMO is the conversion of information from paper into a digital format, allowing it to be processed in databases.
These changes, said Valentine, have allowed them to emerge as the main recipients of outsourced contracts, where companies give them the full responsibility of preparing their forms and mailing them to their clients.
"In years gone by we just printed the forms. Now our clients send their information to us electronically and we take care of everything from organising the documents to mailing them to the customers," said Errol Anderson, XSOMO's marketing manager.
"So essentially we are now an information handling business."
Guess speaker at the function, Douglas Orane hailed XSOMO for the work it was doing, saying that it had huge upside potential for Jamaica, as a product of its nature had the ability to go international.
"Furthermore," added Orane, "having a brand in this era of globalization becomes exponentially valuable, and it is good that XSOMO is keeping up with the changes, because this will keep them alive and competitive in the future."
As to whether competition from domestic rivals affected their decision making, Valentine said "other printers are minor players ...our real competitor was always technology," he added.
In a later interview with the Financial Gleaner, marketing manager Errol Anderson said this did not mean that there was no competition on the local market. "As far as printing goes there is some competition there, however concerning overall competition, we go full cycle and provide a range of services that no one else provides."
