Managed Print Not Just A Defensive Weapon

Toner News Mobile Forums Latest Industry News Managed Print Not Just A Defensive Weapon

Date: Thursday September 20, 2012 07:57:45 am
Viewing 1 post (of 1 total)
  • Author
    Posts

  • Anonymous
    Inactive

    Managed Print Not Just A Defensive Weapon

    Here’s an interesting concept: managed print services as a defensive offering.
    That’s the position advanced by Xerox in an interview with Channelnomics. The printer and document management company said it sees solution and managed service providers adopting the technology as a means of satisfying customers operating requirements and keeping potential competitors from entering their accounts, said Douraid Zaghouani, president of Xerox’s Channel Partner Operations.

    According to Gartner, the average business spends about $300 to $800 a year on printing related activities such as device acquisition, consumable replacement and maintenance. Many businesses are looking to curb these costs, and managed print provides a fixed-cost solution to conventional printing technologies and devices.

    Managed print, as a service offering, has been around since the mid-2000s when it was first introduced by companies such as Xerox, Lexmark and Oki Data. The technology and model has slowly crept up the adoption curve; solution providers by and large have been reluctant to the model because customers haven’t always seen the value.

    The tide is changing, Xerox says, as managed print services is the fastest growing segment in its product portfolio. In 2011, Xerox told Channelnomics that its MPS business was growing 35 percent year over year. Other vendors report similar growth curves. And the expanding demand for managed print as attracted non-printer companies to the market, as many remote monitoring and management vendors such as Level Platforms and LabTech Software now support printer management.

    The managed services market opportunity is potentially lucrative. By the end of the year, Gartner estimates more than 70 percent of large businesses will contract managed print services. Conversely, only 21 percent of SMB companies use managed print and only another 17 percent plan to adopt them this year, according to CompTIA. The difference in MPS adoption between the two market segments is why Xerox sees opportunity.

    While many SMB solution providers are adopting managed print as a means for ensuring they have all the options to complete a customer request, MPS hasn’t truly become a strategic growth engine. In fact, even Xerox admits it’s more of a replacement revenue tool as end users aren’t adding more printing capacity, but rather controlling it through services.

    Solution providers long ago learned the value of managed services as a means for generating recurring revenue and sustained profitability. In the beginning, managed services was a replacement for conventional break/fix services for servers, network devices and printers. It evolved, though, into services that expanded sales into storage, backup and endpoint support. Today, managed services is a gateway to cloud computing and professional services.

    The same migration path could happen with managed print, as it will eventually open the door for solution providers to deliver more workflow optimization and management, document retention and compliance solutions.

    Zaghouani says managed print is at the vanguard of a new effort by Xerox to expand its presence in the SMB channel. Xerox plans to enable more existing resellers with managed print capabilities, turn on its legions of legacy photocopier dealers to service offering and recruit more partners. The end goal, he says, is converting managed print from a defensive to an offensive weapon that grows solution provider businesses.

    Xerox has a point. For too long, the channel has viewed managed print as an opportunistic sale rather than a catalyst for strategic growth. Too often solution providers and copier dealers will default to their comfort zones and sell legacy solutions than push for the service offerings that will provide real benefit to their businesses and their customers.

    The channel is slowing turning toward this point of view. CompTIA, for instance, is seeing surging interest in its Managed Print community as more solution providers look for guidance on how to adopt and take the service to market. Like Xerox, other vendors and distributors are seeing healthy increases in demand. Real growth in managed print will only come when solution providers commit to the practice and stop treating it as a defensive offering.

Viewing 1 post (of 1 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.