“Managed Print Services: A Necessity in Today’s Business Climate” Steve Reynolds of Lyra was back this afternoon for the MPS Segment, tracking the history of Managed Print Services going back to at least 2003, from Office Document Assessments through the current rush to get involved by many categories of hardware and software companies, services companies and resellers.
Photizo Group’s CEO and founder, Ed Crowley, followed Reynolds with “The Real Story behind Managed Print Services”. Drawing on Photizo’s deep understanding of MPS, Crowley shared some of the the dynamics of this fast-growing segment of the Hard Copy business. A 22% CAGR for any (large) segment of the business is enough to get the attention of the industry. Following up on Reynold’s description of the building blocks of MPS, Crowley highlighted more of the nuances of the business, including the growing importance of the IT Manager as the overall MPS decision maker. Photizo’s three-stage MPS Adoption Cycle model was reviewed, which resembled the three reasons for replacing a customer’s output fleet presented earlier in the day by InfoPrint’s Paul Preo.
Q&A for Crowley:
Q: Dealerships and channel moving from product focus to service focus, what is the model? Pre-sales and post-sales, compensation, etc. A: Short version of a long answer, ideally compensation is based on account profitability.
Q: How many OEM vendors are in a typical MPS engagement? A: Typically at least HP and 2-3 other brands. Never all the same, except HP is a given. Programs are out there to help.
(Full disclosure department – the author of this blog is a Senior Consultant with Photizo Group.)
Software Panel
Steve Reynolds, again, doing yeoman duty as the panel chair with panelists Greg Anderson, Ricoh Americas Corporation; Roger Ellefson, Manager, Xerox Corporation ; Vince Jannelli, Sharp Imaging and Information Company of America; Gregory Ryan, Canon U.S.A., Inc.
Entitled “Software for the Office”, that rather generic-sounding name means something much more specific , i.e. printer/copier and especially MFP-based solution software platforms to host specfici developments. What is the impact of the economic woes – more opportunity perhaps? Saving money via solutions for printing and copying, as with MPS, can be a winning argument when times are tight -- in Ryan’s simple but dead-on expression, “an ROI story”. Sharp’s Jannelli equates the software opportunity the buzz in the “MPS story” and the “third step” is the workflow assessment. He also equated some fot he implementation details to a home building analogy – the contractor (solutions dealer in the print/copy analogy) may care about the studs/nails/sheetrock (or Java vs Web), but the home buyer really doesn’t.
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