Ricoh in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sixth Straight Year as Market Shifts to MCS

Ricoh recently announced that it was in the Gartner’s Leaders Quadrant in the Magic Quadrant in the Managed Print and Content Services Worldwide category for 2015. It marks the sixth consecutive award the company has received.

Ricoh joins Lexmark, HP, and Xerox in the Leaders Quadrant. Based on Gartner’s scoring system, Ricoh holds its own among the other three Leader companies when it comes to ability to execute, but falls behind them in completeness of vision.

None of the four companies in the Leaders quadrant were exceptionally strong in ability to execute. Canon, Toshiba, ARC Document Solutions, Konica Minolta, and Kyocera Document Solutions appeared in other quadrants on the graph.

According to IDC, the global market for managed print and document services combined with the market for basic print services totaled $31.2 billion in 2014 and will grow to $48 billion in 2019. This is a CAGR of 8.9 percent, and indicates a relatively mature print services market that still has some growth opportunity, although not on an explosive level.

The transition that Ricoh and the other Leaders Quadrant companies have had to make from focusing on providing printers and copiers to providing managed print services is anything but new.

Green initiatives, the proliferation of mobile devices from employees that no longer work full time in a cubicle, and just a driving need to save costs in general caused this shift long ago. Printing is not done as often as it used to be, especially when documents in digital form will suffice, and when a hard copy is needed the process is better managed and more efficient.

A shift from managed print services (MPS) to managed content services (MCS) is underway. MarketsandMarkets predicts that the global MCS market will more than double from its $24.62 billion level in 2015 to over $59.87 billion in 2020, a CAGR of 19.5 percent.

This trend illustrates just how far document management has come over the years. Offices have evolved from having a printing free-for-all that wasted resources, to a more efficient system of printing to one that is agnostic about the output. Content is content, and it no longer matters what form it comes in.

More information about future MSP trends will be covered at the presentation, Where the Cloud’s Headed for MSP and Small Business? at the upcoming MSP Expo in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from January 25^th-28^th.