Is there anything more troublesome and of less strategic value that enterprise printing? When was the last time that your printers offered competitive advantage?
Like fax, printing is a necessary evil. When they work, no one notices. When they don’t, end users howl and important work is hindered.
Xerox understands this perhaps better than anyone, and its managed printing services are now growing by a third every year. To maintain this pace, Xerox is leaning more and more on partners from its Xerox Partner Print Services group, started just one year ago.
Business is especially hot in Canada where Xerox added 70 providers in the last 12 months.
Partners are apparently into it. “The most exciting part for us is that in the past, it was mostly traditional print-centric VARs that have been going on this business, but now we’re seeing managed service VARS that are looking at print as just another managed service,” said Ajay Dhingra, Xerox vice president of indirect channels.
Xerox supports partners in a number of ways. “The program provides a variety of tools and resources for partners at various points in their own managed services journey – established managed print service providers can simply take on the company’s marketing collateral and/or use its console to manage customers’ environments, while partners who are just starting out can get backstopping from Xerox’s own managed print organization in areas where it’s yet to build its own practice,” the company explained.
Cost Cutting
Xerox believes managed print is a great way to save money, and increase the uptime of your document infrastructure. In fact, with printers scattered throughout the typical organization, as well as in satellite offices and home offices, IT has a thankless management nightmare.
Xerox can help rationalize the entire burden, as it did for Thompson Health. This customer was burdened with the need to print more than eight million pages a year. Xerox moved the health concern to using more scanning, and installed more robust, multifunction printers.
Xerox also claims that the city of Rochester, NY, saved $1.3 million over five years on printing.
Konica Minolta is also bullish on managed print services. In a recent industry report, Key Trends in Managed Print Services (MSP), the company argues that we are quickly reaching the point where printing services spending meets -- and then exceeds -- on-premises spending.
This tipping point is expected to be reached by the end of this year.
Graphic: Managed vs. Traditional Printing
Edited by
Rory J. Thompson
