Last week I attended Xerox’s IT Outsourcing user conference. I spoke on the future of the store to a retail breakout group, but I have to say, I was more interested in the update on Xerox itself.

I have mostly a layman’s view into the company, so I’ll give you that, as it was my starting point for engaging with the company this week at their event. To me, it feels like Xerox has been around forever. I remember them as the company that had to keep “Xerox ” from becoming a verb so that they wouldn’t lose copyright protection on the name. And retail has long been a vertical they have served on the print side of the business – all those distributed stores with all of their signage and pricing requirements are prime targets for the print services that Xerox offers.

But in the meantime, the company has been busy. It’s made a couple of significant acquisitions in the space that have both made its offerings very interesting to retail and made retail a very interesting vertical for the company to pursue. Some of these acquisitions are not new – Xerox acquired ACS in 2009 – but some have been very recent, like the Restaurant Technology Services acquisition made in December of last year.

And I was reminded during the main keynote sessions that Xerox has a strong history of innovation around PARC – a division tasked with inventing the future of how people work. A task they continue to pursue to this day, with a special focus on understanding how to foster innovation and turn it into value, a skill that retailers increasingly need in the technology space and don’t have.

And that’s what leads me to Xerox vs. HP. I was working for PwC during the time when HP contemplated acquiring the consultancy. And their rationale at the time was sound – the future isn’t really in the hardware, it’s in the services. IBM definitely benefitted from HP and PwC not being able to come to a conclusion, and HP went out and acquired EDS instead. It seems like HP was trying to compete with IBM in going after enterprise services, but I’m not sure that they had the right portfolio on the hardware and technology side to support a robust services business.

But HP strikes me as more like Xerox than IBM, and I would argue that Xerox took the smarter of the two approaches. Instead of trying to go after the broadest of enterprise services, Xerox seemed to take the approach of focusing on services that complemented its existing business – printing. Or at least took advantage of a focus on business relationships and functions that were complementary to its existing capabilities. While HP seems lost in trying to define what it really is.

And that leads me to the store. With the combination of the capabilities acquired through ACS and now through RTS, Xerox has a unique position regarding the store, at a time when the store is most disrupted. I can’t comment on whether Xerox is any better at delivering these capabilities than anyone else – that is for each individual retailer to decide – but I can say that after spending a couple of days getting to know the company better, I was impressed.

The store needs help – it needs a lot of infrastructure investment and a lot of process transformation if it wants to keep up with the omni-channel shopper. Xerox has put together a suite of outsourcing capabilities and innovations around the future of work that promise to help retailers focus on store transformation without getting distracted by supporting all that legacy store “junk ” that is getting in the way.

For my part, it was time well-spent.