TO-TRUST OR NOT-TO TRUST THE OEM's ?

[Anonymous]

http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/interview/why-should-we-trust-a-green–printer-maker—1380
TO-TRUST OR NOT-TO TRUST THE OEM’s ?
Users
need to save money and resources by printing less, but printer vendors
want to sell more printers. There’s no conflict, says Graham Long of
Samsung: it’s up to vendors to face the inevitable and lead the way.Any
vendor selling sustainable printing faces a credibility issue.
Companies get greener by using less power and less resources. In the
printing arena, that means having fewer printers, and printing less.
And obviously enough, printer vendors have always made more money by
selling more printers and more consumables.Graham Long, vice president
of Samsung’s European printing operation faces this one head on. “It’s
not in our interest for customers to print less,” he admits, “but it’s
our business to make a profit from what the customers want.”

Printing is one fifth of your budget
Printers
may be cheap to buy, but they are costly to run, thanks to their
consumables, so in an average organisation with more than 500 people,
around one fifth of the IT budget goes on printing, Samsung believes.
Cutting that budget is a big opportunity, and if customers want to
print less, then Samsung wants be the one help them do that, says
Long.”Broadly speaking, if you implement all the controls we offer, you
are looking at cost savings of around fifteen to twenty percent,” he
says.Samsung made laser printer engines for OEM partners since 1991,
and only recently produced its own brand printers as well. This means
it hasn’t got the old vendors’ addiction to selling more ink at any
cost, and is more prepared to offer greener options, he says. “We don’t
have the baggage the other vendors have,” he says.It’s already number
two in Europe, by unit volume, for laser printers, and number one for
A4 colour multi-function printers. It is not in the inkjet space, where
vendors’ cartridge recycling schemes are open to criticism.”It’s about
buying a solution now,” says Long. “Within the printing environment
there are many software applications that allow users to gain control
of their infrastructure.” These solutions operate a high-level
management control, he says. So the accounting department may not need
colour printing – though obviously many companies might want red ink at
the moment.”You can put all these controls in, and companies are also
implementing follow-me printing,” he says. “This eliminates waste.” A
popular option from companies including Lexmark and HP, follow-me
printing means documents are not printed until the user is present, so
they don’t get left abandoned in print trays.”Before a person might
have wanted a printer on their desk,” he says. “Now you look at the
office, and say this whole group needs one multi-function printer, and
three black-and-white single function devices.”Users need to save money
and resources by printing less, but printer vendors want to sell more
printers. There’s no conflict, says Graham Long of Samsung: it’s up to
vendors to face the inevitable and lead the way.he big change is that
now, printers are on the network, and include the copier and fax
function (for those that still use fax) they are under the control of
the IT department, and the costs are more visible: “Before, facilities
owned a part of it – the copier – and IT owned a part of it – the
printer,” says Long. “Now the IT department is in charge of the
decisions, and that allows organisations to realise how much they are
actually spending. If you have two relatively small amounts of money
being spent, that doesn’t appear on the radar. If you bolt them
together, everyone goes ‘Crikey!

Taming uncontrolled printing
“Over
the last year, we’ve seen a trend,” he says. “Organisations have
previously looked to save money through consolidation and
rationalisation of their servers, their PCs and their storage. Now they
are looking at print. And it’s an area that has grown within the
organisation without any methodology.””Historically, in most
organisations, if someone wants to buy a single function device on
their desk, they have gone out and bought it,” he says. This ad hoc
strategy – or lack of strategy – has produced a nightmarish collection
of consumables for multiple brands of printers: “With multiple
manufacturers, you don’t get the best deal on each of the separate
printers you buy.”All of which drives users to what Samsung wants – big
contracts which effectively provide printing as a service from one
vendor: “Put it together, and you get the economies of scale.” This
high level approach includes aspects such as archiving documents, away
from the office building.

What’s in the printers?
Despite
this focus on software and control, Long is keen to say his printers
are greener than other peoples’, of course. Samsung claims to have more
printers certified to the stringent German Blue Angel environmental
label than any other vendor on the planet, and also meets the US Energy
Star requirements. As the company makes things from the component level
up, it can keep leadership here, says Long: “We own the manufacturing
process, start to finish.”.The differences here are likely to be small
in a machine as standard as an inkjet, but they centre on keeping the
device turned off as long as possible, and giving it a sleep mode that
uses very little power. Samsung’s printers also print on both sides of
the paper – although like other vendors, Long is well aware that this
feature is only as good as the extent to which it is enforced amongst
users.The company also operates the obligatory recycling scheme for its
toner cartridges, under the acronym STAR (Samsung Takeback And Return).
It also has a web tool called AnyWeb Print – like the one from HP –
that clips content from web pages, to minimise the amount of
printing.Overall, the big wins in printing are higher up the stack, he
says. It’s management and control that will save both resources and
money, and Samsung wants to be up with the leaders in that field.

[Author]

July 17, 2009 at 2:53 PM