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mps
about 25,000 devices). The pay-off is that
they can manage 1.75 million pages per
service technician per month and expect
to realise an average of 95,000 monthly
pages per MPS customer. This equates to
roughly 2,044 pages per month per MPS
device managed.
5) Target profitability.
After all that effort in the kitchen, the
pay-off is when you sit down to eat the
meal you’ve worked so hard to prepare.
Things are no different for leading providers
for whom profit is a key motivator. These
providers still leverage hardware as a
fundamental part of their strategies, but the
profit was typically derived from other parts
of the overall packaging.
Transform 2012
To learn more about being
successful in managed print
services, attend Photizo Group’s
Transform 2012 event to be held
at the Twickenham Rugby Stadium,
9-10 October. The channel event
of the imaging industry, Transform
covers topics ranging from the
early stages of managed print
services adoption to advanced
Hybrid Provider issues.
Ken Stewart will be hosting a
pre-conference workshop for MPS
providers on October 8. Topics to be
covered include Measure of Success:
A Candid Look Inside Champion
MPS Providers and The Perfect MPS
Assessment: Building Your MPS
Assessment Practice to be Structured
and Repeatable.
Get more information at
www.photizogroup.com/
europe2012
Ken Stewart is Director of
Channel Analysis at Photizo
Group
and founder of the industry
blog ChangeForge.com. Stewart acts
as a leading advocate of MPS channel
research and consulting. A decorated
former Marine, he has successfully
navigated the technology and business
landscape for over a decade, advising
businesses on using technology
processes and manpower to overcome
challenges.
continued...
“To say that the hard copy industry is in a
state of transformation may be too mild
– it is in upheaval,” says Charles LeCompte,
Photizo analyst and director of Photizo’s
new
Digital Workflow Transformation
Advisory Service
(DWTAS).
The state of upheaval began with the great
recession, which started at the end of 2008. At that
point, the decades of steady growth in the industry
were brought to a halt, and hard copy revenue at
most companies fell between 25 and 35% during
the recession. “It has been the industry’s recovery,
or non-recovery, that has been the rude surprise,”
says LeCompte. “In the past three years, even at
the most prosperous hard copy company, revenue
remains far below the pre-recession peak.”
A range of factors has played a role in the
industry’s woes, from the series of natural
disasters in 2011 to the strong yen and the spread
of managed print services, which have driven
organisational imaging costs down by 25-30%. But
beyond these factors lurks a bigger fear: that the
post-recession plateau in printing is the beginning
of an inexorable decline, driven by a permanent
shift in how people use high technology. In
particular, the advent of Apple’s iPad in 2010 sent
a shiver of fear down the industry’s spine. Tablets
have proven immensely popular and seem well
positioned to displace print.
For decades, there have been predictions of a
‘paperless office’. This has never come true, but
the iPad makes the paperless office a much likelier
prospect. In retrospect, it is clear that the barrier
that kept the paperless office from becoming a
reality was the lumbering PC, which was so slow,
heavy, and clunky to use that printing really was
a superior document-viewing option, even though
that choice cost customers $160 billion per year.
Anecdotal evidence supports the
printer industry’s fears.
One insurance
Hard Copy Industry Faces
Upheaval as New User
Technologies Disrupt
Traditional Business
Photizo Group Launches New
Service Charting Future Growth
and New Opportunities for the
Industry
Photo courtesy of Apple
company gave all of its executives iPads, and the
result was a 25-30% drop in the page volumes
printed by executives. We have heard many other
similar stories. Even with 80 million or so iPads out
there, it is not likely that the Apple device has had
much impact on total print volumes yet, especially
print volumes in office environments, where the
iPad and other tablet devices are just now gaining
traction.
It is now clear to most people in the hard copy
industry that a mighty storm is building, and it
is high time to start figuring out how to survive
it. Many printer companies are already moving
to protect themselves by diversifying into other
industries. Pure common sense suggests that
it will not be easy for the hard copy industry to
replace $160 billion in highly profitable revenue.
Historically, companies in a dying or disrupted
market seldom successfully leap into new markets.
“Here at Photizo, we plan to watch and
measure the industry’s transformation – or non-
transformation, as the case may be – very closely,”
says LeCompte. Photizo has just launched a new
service, the
Digital Workflow Transformation
Advisory Service
, which has a two-fold mission: to
keep a close eye on existing hard copy firms and
track their evolution while scanning the horizon for
new firms, technologies and markets that offer the
industry a path for growth.
Photizo’s new service examines the
transformation of workflow and provides
clients with analysis of the shifting imaging and
information market. A comprehensive guide
to future opportunities, the
Digital Workflow
Transformation Advisory Service
provides a critical
window into the drivers and impediments to
change, how competitors are reacting to or even
driving this change, and what it means to the
imaging market.
www.photizogroup.com/DWTAS