“It’s turning all the way towards solutions.” He adds that many of the channel companies servicing the printing market are merely selling consumables.
“If they don’t figure out a way to lock the client in for a few years then someone else will do it for them.”
Another important services opportunity for resellers eyeing the MPS market is security. CBS in the US recently conducted an investigation of the second-hand printer market and found alarming examples of organisations from police to health insurers having sold machines without cleaning the hard drives.
The situation in Australia is reportedly just as bad if not worse. A recent survey conducted by Smart Print found 60 percent of workers aren’t aware that many printers, copies and scanners have hard drives which can store documents, in some cases numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
Brands lose their lustre
One of the consequences of the transition to services- based MPS is that the actual brand names are increasingly less of a factor in the decision-making process.
“Twenty years ago brand was everything,” says Upstream’s Tilley. “But in today’s world customers don’t care about brand.”
And it would seem the vendors are perhaps a little less concerned about their own brands these days, with a number of big players selling each other’s wares in certain markets. For instance, HP signed an agreement in 2009 allowing it to market and distribute Canon’s range of imageRUNNER office MFDs and its imagePRESS production systems in several key markets including Asia Pacific. In the same year Toshiba entered into an agreement to sell HP’s entire line of laser jet printers in the US.
The average medium-sized organisation could very likely be using printers, copiers and fax machines from several different vendors. In many cases resellers with multiple vendor relationships will be better placed to deliver this level of support than individual vendors which, no matter what they claim, are looking for ways to push their own technology.
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