Hewlett-Packard Co.'s shift into the higher-margin enterprise software segment has not come at the expense of its traditional printing business, which it continues to grow through in-house R&D and acquisitions.

It's most recent deal to boost its crown-jewel printing unit was announced Monday, when the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said it would acquire NUR Macroprinters Ltd. for $117.5 million in cash.

Lod, Israel-based NUR makes industrial wide-format digital inkjet printers, and will help HP expand its wide-format digital printing business. This sector of the printing market is growing because of improvements in the quality of digital print that makes it more practical for printing images on signage, city buses and billboards.

Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president of HP's imaging and printing group, described the purchase as "another milestone in HP's growth strategy to ignite the transition from converting analog pages to digital pages." While digital printing has long been popular for personal and office uses, HP says there is still a largely untapped market in larger industrial uses.

This strong attention to the printing business is a key factor differentiating HP from IBM Corp. While HP has in many ways followed IBM's lead in growing its enterprise software businesses and has made a string of software acquisitions, it continues to see printing as a key area of innovation and profit growth.

IBM, by contrast, earlier this year sold its printer division to Japan's Ricoh Co. Ltd., for $725 million, a price that was generally regarded as low, reflecting the company's lack of focus on printing in recent years.

HP has made a number of acquisitions in the printing sector since Mark Hurd took over as CEO in 2005. The first acquisition on Hurd's watch was Scitex Corp. Ltd., also an Israel-based maker of printing technology, which HP bought for $230 million. At the time, HP said that only a small portion of wide-format signs like billboards were printed digitally, but that the size of that market could double in five years with improved printing technologies and the development of more durable, weather-resistant inks.

Earlier this year, HP acquired MacDermid ColorSpan Inc., a maker of wide-format digital inkjet printers also focused on the large-format signage market.