Document showdown

Who is going to win between copier and printer vendors? Each side favours its own chances. Printer vendors point out that the majority of copier platforms are based on A3 and not the industry standard A4. Paying for a larger A3 machine raises TCO and cost per print, and Croshaw claims that most prints are half-page emails.

“How much A3 does your company print?” asks Geoff Croshaw, managing director of Fuji Xerox Printers Australia New Zealand.

Neil Tilley from reseller Upstream, says the battle is a little more even and is determined by the application. If the device will be used for copy-heavy jobs, pick an MFP from a copier vendor; for print-heavy jobs, pick a printer vendor.

“Vendors have strong and weak line-ups,” says Tilley.

He compares the situation to car makers that have vehicles in every segment but each has at least one segment with a better model than its competitors.

One easy prediction is that hardware prices will continue to drop. The laser market has grown 25 percent according to IDC market figures as one of the advantages held by low-end inkjets – a cheap unit price – has come under attack.

Colour laser and high-end lasers with more memory and peripherals are boosting dollar sales value, to the good fortune of printer resellers everywhere.

But while hardware becomes cheaper, the cost of consumables has remained steady and continues to be the hidden cost in printing. “We will see hardware pricing come down dramatically but not consumables,” says Malcolm Hancock, principal analyst, print markets and management team, in Gartner’s UK offices.

The Australian consumables market is a massive $6.5 billion per year in print and copy toner. SMEs will pay the initial purchase price of a printer several times over in toner during its lifetime, but at least one vendor believes the issue attracts too much attention. TCO is the key. Where a vendor generates profit is irrelevant,” says Croshaw.

Colour everywhere

Colour is becoming a more affordable option as prices of colour lasers continue to tumble. Colour laser is winning out over inkjet in the SME space because unit costs have fallen and the TCO is cheaper over a two to three year period.

Kyocera has found itself in the number two spot for laser printers by heavily pushing lowest running costs for its units. Its colour laser units cost as little as eight cents per page, which is a sizeable saving given that some inkjets cost up to 50 cents per page, says Anthony Toope, marketing manager at Kyocera Mita Australia.

Epson has introduced individual colour cartridges across its entire range of inkjets and colour lasers and MFPs to avoid wastage and lower consumable costs. “In the SME or corporate space running costs are a hot item,” says Mike Pleasants, Epson Austrlia’s director of marketing communications, and adds that some competitors only use individual cartridges on their higher-end machines.

Croshaw even goes so far as to say that the days of business inkjet in the corporate and SME market are numbered. Colour laser will eventually prove to be the inkjet killer, believes Croshaw, but until quality improves he sees room in the market for solid ink printers.

Solid ink printers are comparable to colour lasers in unit price but produce higher quality output. For speed, quality and efficiency, solid ink trumps inkjet, says Croshaw. Fuji Xerox plans to send solid ink up against mid to high-end inkjets and mid colour lasers in proofing and arts businesses.

Government is one market the vendor will target heavily on environmental grounds. Solid ink refills have no other packaging than the cardboard box they arrive in, which is fully recyclable. “Any government department that does not have our solid ink device as their colour device in their environment has no adherence to their environmental policy,” says Croshaw.

But although laser colour is coming into its own it still lacks punch in the performance stakes. For this reason inkjets will never lose their niche, though it may be reducing in size. Against the tide of lasers Lanier is bringing out a new type of inkjet printer that uses a thick, viscous gel which dries as soon as it hits the paper. The geljets address the failings of both lasers and inkjets.

The new breed produce waterproof prints that don’t blur on plain paper, can print labels and are UV stable, which means they can print material suitable for window displays.

The geljet uses a modular technology that can vary ink particle size from five to 36 picolitres to improve print speed and quality. The ultralight heads are much faster than those on a standard inkjet and can print at near-laser printer speeds.

“There is a huge section of the marketplace that doesn’t want to pay $500 for an inkjet printer and then spend $800 for a complete set of toner cartridges,” says Branko Bendekovic, national business development manager for Lanier.

The geljets introduce a third print mode called level colour mode which is a step up in quality from economy but is cheaper to run than full ink mode.

Lanier claims the printers can produce good-quality prints for the price of a mono inkjet print, or under 10 cents a page – comparable to colour laser.

Lanier is pitching the product between low-cost mono inkjets and low-cost colour lasers for “anyone who wants to use colour technology but can’t use a colour laser”, says Bendekovic.

The geljets come with many business functions as standard such as duplexing, better paper handling, email alerts and a security option. A print from a geljet which is then copied or scanned will embed a message on the document copy indicating that it is not the original.

MFPs continue to outperform standalones as they have done for the past 18 months. SMEs have overcome concerns regarding reliability after earlier models were found lacking. “There was a fear that if one part of an MFP failed I might lose everything and bring the business to a standstill,” says Pleasants.

Now as reliable as a printer, MFPs are attractive for their space-saving and versatility as a unit that can perform four functions rather than simply print, says Pleasants.

Pricing is also equal to or lower than individual units.

However Croshaw also suggests that some resellers may be unnecessarily pushing MFPs when high-end printers would be more economical. Most people don’t need to leave their PC to receive or send a fax, he says.

“How many businesses truly have a high demand for fax and scan from the same device from which you print and photocopy?” asks Croshaw. “There’s a lot of talk but reality is still something we have to see around MFPs.”
Printers are such mechanical beasts it comes as a surprise that one of the biggest developments has come in software.

A large amount of guesswork often goes into estimating print or copy costs, particularly with copier vendors. However these predictions are rarely accurate and the customer usually ends up overpaying, but cannot prove otherwise.

In the last couple of years reviews have gone from manual assessments conducted by printing a status report from each device to a server-based program that automatically populates a database with usage data emitted by all network-connected devices.

The information includes device make and model, serial number, pages printed per day, toner levels and system alerts.

However most vendors’ applications require access to a customer’s network, which means a reseller has to visit the premises or convince the IT department to grant access through the firewall.

With corporate espionage, identity theft and virus transmissions in the foremost of CIOs’ minds, letting in a printer reseller to keep an eye on toner is a big ask.

Resellers often set programs on their clients’ print server to email toner requests once levels run low. However new software released last month avoids the need to cross firewalls and provides much more information than an email-operated flag system.

Global Print Management is a program under exclusive licence from the US, where it is known as Printfleet. Its greatest improvement over other products is that it doesn’t require a reseller to have access to a customer’s network.

IPL is setting itself up as an ASP where resellers can log into the application, look up their customer and view a complete rollcall of devices on its network.

The customer doesn’t need to open any ports in its firewall, as the program acts like a Trojan horse on a customer’s PC and broadcasts MIB data to the IPL server.

Any imaging device connected to the customer’s network can be measured, even if the devices are sitting in a different building or another state or country.

Another bonus is that the software is vendor independent. Device information is represented with a colour picture, a link to the manufacturer site, usage statistics and a bar graph representing the toner level. Page counts are calculated separately for colour and black and white. “This is the biggest paradigm change in printing in the last five or 10 years,” says Stead Denton, CEO of IPL Group.

The implications for resellers in the print game are important. Instead of sitting by the phone waiting for requests for more toner, a reseller can monitor customers’ machines and call when toner hits a set percentage.

It also means customers no longer need to stock toner on their premises in case a device runs out of ink in the middle of a critical job. Companies which run 100 printers can have as much as $15,000 worth of toner sitting under desks, capital which could otherwise be freed up and used elsewhere.

The performance of customers’ machines can also be monitored from the reseller’s office. A printer running at 10 percent can be replaced with a cheaper model; a bunch of five machines over seven years old may have too many service calls, and several newer devices could lower per page print costs.

A good software tool can provide the reseller with insight on when to make a pitch as well as the data to back up a consultative sell.

Accordingly, IPL is assessing how it can integrate its software into CRM packages to help its resellers plan their sales.

IDL is hoping to sign up 30 of its 250-strong reseller base over the next 12 months.

One IDL reseller, Queensland-based Network Office Supplies, has been trialling the software since July with three customers.

Within half an hour of loading the software, one customer, the government-funded society Cerebral Palsy League, discovered it had 42 printers and not the 35 it thought it had. “Straight away they were 15 percent out, so they had no way of knowing what their printing costs were,” says Mark Tuuta, account manager of Network Office Supplies, which is the largest OKI dealer in Australia.

The society estimated it was printing 276,000 pages a month at a cost of $3000-3500. The actual cost was $4500 per month, says Tuuta.

Another trial customer, a regulatory body, discovered it had 166 machines, and not 144. Tuuta used the software in his office to set the machines to email him only for critical alerts and received 162 in the first month.

IDL is charging its resellers $1000 a month to use the software for up to 500 devices, which resellers are expected to pass onto consumers as an optional service at $2-3 a device.

However Tuuta plans to use the software even for customers that don’t want to pay for the service because it allows the reseller to trap the lucrative consumables business by making a call before the toner runs out.

Also the software gives the reseller an idea of which machines are over-utilised and potentially be replaced with a newer model. The guesswork is over, says Tuuta.

“Now you can start making recommendations based on fact.”