Special Focus
7 Top Printing & Imaging Trends
By Varun Aggrawal
The imaging and printing solutions (IPS) market was heavily impacted by the slowdown in 2009. With things starting to improve and customer buying getting stronger, let’s look at some of the key areas partners should focus on this year to ensure higher revenues.
Green printing
Green has become an integral part of any successful company’s IT operations as it steps up its initiatives to turn environment-friendly and cut costs. Apart from focusing on reducing cost through lower power consumption products and duplex printing, vendors are making sure their products comply with RoHS standards, and making the printing device green in every aspect.
Green is not just a buzzword any more, it’s now a value proposition for customers. Vendors are putting a lot of thrust on training their partners to sell more effectively. Vendors such as HP and Canon are giving tools like a ROI calculator for the pre-sales reps to demonstrate the benefits of green printers vis-à-vis the old printers, and a number of partner training programs are on the cards to evangelize the benefits of green products in 2010.
HP’s green initiative, HP Eco Solutions, empowers customers in the enterprise segment to reduce their environmental impact and save money. The practice includes an extensive portfolio of tools, software, hardware, services and expertise in the form of a green IT action plan, change management kits, and the HP carbon footprint calculator.
Similarly, Canon has made all its laser printers auto duplex, cutting down paper costs by up to 50 percent.
The devices also come with features such as sleep mode, standby mode and eco mode to save power.
Apart from making their print devices green, in 2010 vendors would also be focusing on making printer components and cartridges green so that they can be easily recycled. In fact, Canon is offering stands and stabilizers (which go with printers) that conform to RoHS standards, thus taking green printing to the next level.
Says SM Ramprasad, Senior Business Manager, Consumer Product Group, Epson India, “We are pretty serious about making our products as green as possible, taking into consideration the micro components and the chip-level power consumption. Our latest range of office inkjet printers consumes only 40W of power compared to 120W consumed by a traditional laser printer.”
Managed print services
Managing document printing and providing the right solutions to meet specific needs are enormous challenges for CIOs. It is important that the solutions provided be robust, future-ready, and help in simplifying existing processes rather than build new processes. Successful managed print services (MPS) implementation demands user-friendliness and secure access to information, along with compatibility with existing infrastructure. A report by Springboard Research estimates the MPS market in Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan) to grow to $1 billion by 2012. The Indian market is expected to be the fastest growing in the region, with a CAGR of 22.6 percent.
“Recession was the biggest driver for MPS in 2009. As budgets went south, enterprises started looking at opex models to meet their requirements, and MPS came as an obvious solution. However, most of these deployments were in large enterprises. We are expecting SMBs to follow suit in 2010, and that would be an area where partners can play a crucial role,” opines Puneet Datta, Senior Marketing Manager, Canon. Canon invested Rs 100 crore in the MPS business to leverage this opportunity in 2009.
MPS can help an organization reduce 30 percent of its print costs by putting the right controls in place and cutting Capex costs completely. There are different pricing models in MPS; these vary depending on customer usage and requirements. For example, a customer can be charged on a simple per page cost, or it could be a fixed amount per month irrespective of the actual copies printed. Other more complex models include looking at the average page coverage of a print in an organization, and charging accordingly. For instance, an ad agency might be printing images and graphs with page coverage of over 30 percent, while a bank could have a page coverage of just 5 percent on the average.
Vendors are also following different delivery models. While in some cases they keep the ownership of the equipment and pay the partner for the services, in other models vendors either lease the equipment or sell it at discounted prices to the partner, and then let the partner decide on the pricing model.
All vendors are scouting for partners, though in small numbers, to cater to the SMB sector. Epson, which has 10 MPS partners to cater to large enterprises, is looking for five more partners to cater to SMBs. Canon has been using 150 of its partners for implementing its MPS projects and for serving remote offices of large enterprises; it is now scaling up its partners’ skills for them to offer end-to-end MPS solutions to SMBs. Xerox is building a partner framework to offer MPS to SMB customers, and is scouting for five partners who would be either regional SIs or VARs.
Multi function devices
Multi function devices (MFDs) have been one of the most underutilized devices in printing. According to one estimate, an average user utilizes only about 20-30 percent of the features available in an MFD. Most MFDs are bundled with so many features that few are even aware of them. In 2010, vendors are therefore not focusing on adding too many new features to MFDs; instead, they are enhancing the user interface so that users can easily utilize the existing ones.
For Canon, 2010 will be a year of converged devices. The vendor plans to launch about 20 MFDs, and will focus largely on simplifying the user interface and integrating with document management solutions, thus eliminating the need for third-party tools. According to Datta, “People don’t scan on a network device because of complexities. Similarly, they don’t use features like scan to e-mail or control the print quality. We’ll ensure that all these things are simplified in our new line of products by reducing the number of steps required to complete a task. Our new converged devices will also offer high-speed printing—twice or thrice [the speed] of stand-alone printers, thus eliminating the need for stand-alone devices.”
Xerox will be focusing on improving the print quality in MFDs, while Epson will focus on improving the look and feel of its products, and making them trendy and wireless to enhance the ambience of an office. Epson is also working toward ensuring that users take maximum advantage of available features.
New-age consumables
The consumables business suffered a blow in 2009 as customers turned to refills to save costs. To overcome this vendors are looking at innovative ways to fight the refills market because a direct war is not possible. Vendors have already invested heavily in customer and channel education to communicate research findings to suggest the benefits and ROI of original ink cartridges.
Variable volume cartridges is also an emerging model to cater to price-conscious customers. Then there are ultra-high volume cartridges, which partners have been looking out for long. “We’ve launched high-capacity cartridges that can print up to 7,000 pages,” states Ramprasad.
“We will focus on establishing Ink in Office as a value proposition, and have made additions to the Best Choice portfolio,” informs Samir Shah, Director, Commercial and Enterprise Printing Business, IPG, HP India. “This includes the HP Simple Black version of our popular HP Black Inkjet Print Cartridge (HP 27b) at Rs 399 for every day printing, while quality-conscious customers can continue to choose the standard and improved version of these black inkjet print cartridges (P+, HP 27a) at Rs 843. We are also making innovations in ink technology, and have introduced the HP 818B and 56B Everyday Black ink cartridges. Available at Rs 399 and Rs 599, these are ideal for customers who need good enough quality for everyday printing.”
Partnering with organized refill stations to offer branded refill kits is also an option that none of the vendors have explored so far. However, Princy Bhatnagar, Director, Office Business Group, Xerox India says, “While we haven’t considered the option so far, there isn’t any reason to say no to any organized refill partner .”
Document management solutions
According to IDC, executives spend 45 percent of their time working with documents. Around 610 billion e-mails are sent each year, out of which about half are printed and more than 7.5 billion new documents are created in offices every day, resulting in more than one trillion pages each year. Managing such large volumes of data is one of the top priorities of organizations today.
High volumes of physical records also lead to other problems including irregularities, loss of data, and duplication. The Indian document management solutions (DMS) market is expected to be worth around $50 million by 2012. It is growing at a CAGR of 22.93 percent, which happens to be the highest rate in the APAC market. Presently, the market is in the $23 million range.
“Verticals such as telecom, healthcare, manufacturing, government, PSUs and IT/ITES are opting for DMS. Multinationals are re-looking at their licensing policy for the Indian market, and DMS providers are re-working their pricing and go-to-market strategy,” notes Vishal Tripathi, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner. “E-governance projects in India will also fuel the growth of DMS.”
Adds Ramprasad, “Every user requirement for DMS is different, and thus customized solutions are required. In the past 8 months we’ve had 1,500 customized installations on Linux platform. We would encourage ISVs and SIs to offer DMS as a SaaS offering.”
Scanners
Stand-alone scanners showed the highest growth in the IPS segment in 2009, while in most countries the market for scanners is declining. Some of the biggest drivers here are DMS, government projects for digitization, and banks adopting the cheque truncation system (CTS).
CTS is being adopted by the central banks of many countries, including India, UAE and Saudi Arabia, for the faster clearing of cheques. Now in its second phase in India, it will be a growth propeller for the scanner market.
Ramprasad comments, “We are seeing huge demand for scanners in the BFSI and government sectors. While most government deployments are for digitization, BFSI is using them for direct FTP loading, scanning customer signatures for quick validation, etc. We are working with 10 ISVs to build industry-specific scanning solutions.”
While scanners will continue to grow in 2010 in India, the prime focus would be on special-purpose scanners to cater to specific industry verticals. Also, entry-level scanners may be cannibalized by low-cost MFDs.
Color printing
Color penetration in India stands at about 4 percent, leaving a vast market opportunity for vendors to explore. Some of the barriers to color printing are high cost per page and misuse of color in enterprises.
HP is pushing the value proposition that the cost of printing black on its color laser printer is the same as the cost of printing black on a mono laser. Epson is going all the way to say ‘print color at the cost of a mono laser.’ Such initiatives to bring down the cost of color can significantly impact the market.
In order to control the cost of color printing, print monitoring software can help organizations control who gets access to color printing in the organization while monitoring the total color consumption by each employee.
Another move to improve color penetration is to create relevance for color printing. To establish the relevance of color printing solutions in the office, HP India launched the Color Matters initiative in 2009; this highlighted the advantages of in-house printing. Canon has also launched similar initiatives wherein they are providing partners with colored sales brochures to show how color can create a difference.
Printing official documents and marketing collaterals in color within the office can help companies improve their efficiency and profitability in multiple ways. Verticals which look at deploying color solutions in order to maintain their competitive edge include the hospitality, healthcare, retail, jewellery, manufacturing and exports industries, as well as marketing and ad agencies. |