Why Managed Print Services?

"Typically, most enterprises don't manage their printers. Organizations have fragmented purchasing for printers; usually, purchasing is done departmentally and supplies aren’t centralized, so they are paying the maximum amount that they can," says Peter Grant, the managing VP of Printing Markets for Gartner Research.

"A lot of time when IT managers go into these exercises, they don't even know how many printers that they actually have. In every case, people have more printers than they thought they had. In some cases, they have more printers than they have users in their organizations. Most organizations need to carefully examine their printer fleets. These network discovery tools are important and can find more savings than IT managers can do on their own. It is worth going through [the tools]," says Steve Reynolds, a printer analyst with Lyra Research.

I have yet to run an assessment for a client and had them tell me accurately how many printers they had. They typically are off by 20%.

Tough Economic Times

Clearly we are in the midst of an economic downturn and nearly every business is struggling to varying degrees. What should we be doing for our clients and customers in order to grow our respective businesses? Maintain a laser focus on delivering value and cost recovery are what I am finding as the answer. In eleven years of selling I have never heard from the market as huge of a demand for solutions to reduce costs associated with office printing/copying and document management. Is this always possible? I wish the answer was yes, but more often then not we are finding ways to recover costs for our clients.

If your business is struggling I would suggest that you either look for ways to help your clients grow significantly their revenues or reduce costs. These are not revolutionary concepts, but today more then ever we have to clearly deliver these benefits for our clients and prospective clients.