Both present exciting new possibilities for marketing and communications. Cloud-based printing services are also expected to really take off in the next few years, especially in industries where there is an emphasis on mobility. Voice operated devices are expected to find favour within a broad spectrum of industries.
According to Ed Elliff, MPS manager, Lexmark Australia, while there is “a lot of activity currently in the channel space around MPS, . . . there are many road blocks for resellers to navigate.”
The company says it has made significant investments in consumable and inventory management in a bid to reduce the risk for its channel partners. “Lexmark takes on the risk and resellers gets to maintain customer relationship.”
There is an argument that big vendors lack the resources to give smaller clients the attention they deserve. Depending on the program, it may not be a big jump either to augment an existing usage-based program with value-added services or to add MPS to an existing portfolio of offerings.
Furthermore, as decisions about printing are increasingly made by IT managers and not office administrators, traditional IT resellers are viewing greater opportunities to enter the MPS market.
“There’s a huge number of SMBs, and resellers already have relationships in this space,” says IDC
lead analyst Trevor Clarke.
It ain’t vacuum cleaners
The other side of the coin though is that MPS offerings are increasingly being subjected to far greater scrutiny than in the past and must therefore be more rigorously designed. “With the IT manager, they have real financial accountability for these things,” says Mark Davies, group business analyst with listed ICT company and printing specialists CSG. “They have to demonstrate value for the business.”
But while the debate continues about the role of the channel in MPS, the fact remains that it is only those companies which strike the right balance of skills and technology that are going to make any headway in this market.
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