Are Managed Print Services the future?

Taking on such a fleet means not only being able to supply consumables and parts on demand for every machine, but also having the technicians available to maintain and provide break-fix servicing for the entire fleet – possibly in multiple locations. It’s enough to turn your average network- and server-focused reseller off the whole idea. That’s where the printer vendor steps in.

“Managed print services are not anything new of course, they been around they have been around for a while,” pointed out Ghai. “It is just that there wasn’t a very structured approach to providing these services in the printer market,” he said. “The large printer vendors have had a solid amount of MPS contracts in place, but in terms of go-to-market there wasn’t initially a clear strategy from most players.”

The shift to Managed Print Services is none too surprising. It follows what has become a familiar pattern in the industry as just about everything else seems to naturally migrate from product to service. It is the scale that is changing the landscape the fastest.

“What has been happening over the past 18 months is that vendors have been trying to build out a structure around MPS. The goal is to make it available to different levels,” said Ghai. “Where in the past it was only available to large key accounts, now the vendors are looking at providing it to smaller entities.”

“Naturally, that triggers a channel involvement. In the past the trend was for vendors to provide Managed Print Services themselves using their own staff. Now they are trying to make it broad-based they need the channel to partner with them and take the solution to a much wider audience.”

Lewis at Fuji Xerox said DataQuest research suggests that business printing costs can be characterised by a 3:2:1 ratio. Of the total printing cost, one sixth is the cost of the hardware, two sixths are soft-costs incorporating everything from walking too far to the printer to under-utilised asset cost, while three sixths , or half, is the cost of management.

It’s this half of the printing cost to organisations that represent the largest opportunity to resellers. And printer vendors for that matter. The actual cost of printing stuff onto paper only represents around 10-15 percent of the total cost. The channel can develop a win-win proposition by helping companies reduce their soft printing costs while also shifting the management burden to the reseller (for a fee).