How Managed Print Services Can Save Money And The Environment | Green Earth Voices Show

How Managed Print Services Can Save Money And The Environment Green Earth Voices Show

Printer Makers Look To Service Model For Growth

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20111007-705805.html
By Matt Jarzemsky Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Printing companies, facing stalling growth in traditional hardware and supplies sales, are increasingly competing for contracts to overhaul the way their customers deal with printing.

Competition has intensified among Xerox Inc. (XRX), Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) and others in providing so-called managed print services, in which they handle all of a customer's printing needs--from the machines and ink to consulting on reducing costs--typically over the course of a three- to five-year contract.

The business is set to grow 11% to $9.4 billion this year, according to market researcher International Data Corp.

But it remains unclear whether making clients more efficient in their printing--such as by reducing the number of printers per employee in an office--will eat into sales of hardware and toner. That concern comes at a time when sales of printers and supplies are expected to remain flat over the medium-to-long term.

"I think there's no question that if you're going to reduce [printing costs by] 30%, there is some cannibalization," said Bruce Dahlgren, head of H-P's printing services unit. "These customers want to print less. We want to provide the right technology to meet the customer's needs."

The cannibalization is eased by the fact that many potential customers exist, as companies look to cut costs and see managing their print operations better as a way to do so.

"Most enterprises and mid-sized companies don't do a good job of managing print," said Ken Weilerstein, an analyst at research firm Gartner Inc. He said managed print projects typically cut printing costs by 10% to 30%.

The business demands continued investment to improve equipment, as well as areas such as software that enables printing from mobile devices, H-P's Dahlgren said.

"We're on the hook every quarter to bring new solutions" to the company's managed print services offering, he said.

Xerox is ramping up hiring to support growth in managed print services. This year, it's tripling the number of staffers devoted to finding new business at the unit that contains its managed print services operation.

The market has become more competitive and "isn't for the faint of heart" as many large companies have already signed up with providers, Xerox Senior VP Jim Joyce said.

Joyce said Xerox has shifted its efforts to focus on selling the service to small and medium sized businesses, fewer of which already buy their printing that way. Deals with those customers tend to be smaller, but the market is "really starting to move," he said.

Xerox and H-P are considered by many to be the leaders in the market, though estimates of companies' market share vary, and Lexmark International Inc. (LXK) and Ricoh Co. Ltd. (RICOY, 7752.TO) are also big players.

Lexmark is focusing more marketing spending on managed print services, said John Crandall, general manager of the company's enterprise unit. The company is also seeking salespeople with international and industry experience to help it expand beyond its strengths in the retail and financial services sectors.

"If I've been pushing boxes before, I can't go in and turn my hat around, and I'm a services person all of a sudden," Crandall said. "You're going into a much more complex sale, it's a higher-level sale, often at the C-level."

Weilerstein said growth in the managed print business appeals to printer makers because it compares with stagnation in traditional sales of printers, ink and supplies. The providers are also drawn to the area because it allows them to gain control of large fleets of printers at once, he said.

Printing companies' motivation to sign managed print services contracts involves more than just revenue growth. "The service provider is in the catbird seat" because it can install its own products across a client's operations, Forrester Research analyst Craig Le Clair said. "They're going to lose revenue over time if they don't win these coveted spots.

Le Clair said that the overall market for managed print services is expanding enough to give all the established providers room to grow in the area.

-By Matt Jarzemsky, Dow Jones Newswires; 212-416-2240; matthew.jarzemsky@dowjones.com

Xerox Announces Relationship with ABBYY

ABBYY and Xerox Ink Certified Partner Reseller Agreement

New North American Reseller Agreement Addresses Content Management and Data Capture Needs in the Market

Milpitas, USA (September 22, 2011) ABBYY provider of document recognition, data capture, and linguistic technologies and professional services, today announced that it has entered into a certified partner reseller agreement with Xerox Corporation. Under the new agreement, Xerox will resell ABBYY’s FlexiCapture and Recognition Server solutions to its United States, Canada and Mexico customer base as an offering for Xerox DocuShare, extending ABBYY’s reach in these key regions. With this agreement in place, Xerox will be able to address the needs of DocuShare customers requiring a complete content management solution with high-performance data and image capture technology.

“Enterprise content management solutions need sophisticated capture and recognition tools to understand documents and images quickly, which automates manual tasks and reduces cost at the front end,” said Harvey Spencer, industry analyst and president, Harvey Spencer Associates, Inc. “The relationship between ABBYY and Xerox DocuShare can bring to the market effective automated content acquisition solutions that are critical components in the enterprise. This looks to be a positive business move for both parties.”

Xerox DocuShare is a content management platform with thousands of worldwide customer deployments, ranging from simple document management applications to more robust process automation solutions. ABBYY was selected after an extremely competitive evaluation because of their solutions’ performance, ability to integrate into existing Xerox DocuShare solutions, and outstanding track record.

“Xerox has always been focused on delivering innovative products to market that solve real business problems,” said David Smith, vice president and general manager, DocuShare Business Unit, Xerox Corporation. “As we extend the capabilities of our content management solutions, ABBYY quickly emerged as the data capture provider of choice because of their industry-leading functionality and understanding of customer needs. We are now able to provide even greater efficiencies and business value to our customers by partnering with ABBYY.”

With the agreement, ABBYY’s FlexiCapture and Recognition Server will be sold by the Xerox direct sales organization, DocuShare direct sales, and Reseller Partners. Through the sale of combined content management and data capture solutions, ABBYY and Xerox DocuShare are addressing changing needs for enterprise organizations looking for ways to better manage their critical data and documents. The partnership will allow Xerox to strengthen its offerings by making highly accurate capture available to DocuShare services and solutions.

“ABBYY has a long-standing and successful relationship with Xerox, and we are pleased to expand our partnership,” said Steve Kincade, Vice President, Channels North America, ABBYY USA. “This win is a milestone in the development of our relationship with Xerox. We see the agreement as a key step in increasing ABBYY’s capture and imaging business by providing additional capabilities to sophisticated enterprise content management solutions.”

Why the fax machine refuses to die

There are only two types of technology that I absolutely hate with a passion: printers and faxes. Printers are obviously the bane of IT. With all those drivers for every operating system version (usually about 150 times the size of the actual driver file itself), a predilection for jamming, and of course those ever-popular toner explosion scenarios, I'm still scarred by memories of printer disasters.

But I can accept that printers exist because, yeah, sometimes things need to be printed out. Faxes, however, should be banished to the land of RLL drives and the 5.25-inch floppy. Faxes have no need to exist today, yet they're still all over the place. It's maddening.

[ Also on InfoWorld.com: Read Paul Venezia's classic, "Nine traits of the veteran Unix admin." | Or see if you qualify for the title of certified IT ninja. | Get a $50 American Express gift cheque if we publish your tech tale from the trenches. Send it to offtherecord@infoworld.com. ]

Consider what a fax machine actually is: a little device with a sheet feeder, a terrible scanning element, and an ancient modem. Most faxes run at 14,400bps. That's just over 1KB per second -- and people are still using faxes to send 52 poorly scanned pages of some contract to one another. Over analog phone lines. Sometimes while paying long-distance charges! The mind boggles.

Here's what a fax should be: a little device with a sheet feeder, a reasonably solid scanning element, an Ethernet cable, and no modem whatsoever. It should just be a network scanning function. That's it. You drop a paper document in the feeder, run a small applet on your computer (or on the device itself) that drags the resulting scan into a nice clean (and possibly encrypted) PDF on your system or network, at which point you use any number of methods to send it to someone. Heck, be "old-fashioned" and email the thing. It'll get there in 1/100 the time of the fax, it won't cost money or tie up a phone line, and it will result in far better quality than a low-res scan compressed to squeeze through a data path with the same bandwidth as a piece of bailing wire.

Yet the ancient fax machine survives.

One of the big reasons that people resist mothballing the fax machine is that some items need signatures. I can understand that, but there are already a dozen ways to digitize your signature and apply it to documents. You could also "sign" on your touchpad. These days a signature is all but worthless as an actual traceable indicator of identity, as borne out by the hundreds of times I've signed a POS credit-card machine or delivery service signature pad. Even I couldn't tell you that the resulting signature was mine seconds after I'd signed it. They all look more or less like a random horizontal line that may or may not start with what might be a P. Or an R. It doesn't seem to matter.

Nonetheless, I can understand that traditionalists might demand faxes for contracts and other documents that need an ink signature. OK, fine, let's limit it to that. But no! According to GreenFax, there are over 200 billion pages still faxed every year, and you can be damned sure they're not all contracts. Informational faxes fan out from tons of organizations to tons of other organizations -- with a computer generating the faxes on the send side using a fax modem to send them. It's like a tiny bubble of 1995 surrounds every fax machine. A computer could easily be tasked with emailing the same information or even (gasp!) updating an RSS feed.

True, email is not what it once was, thanks to the bottom-dwelling villanous scumbags that persist in sending billions of spam messages every year. But I'd venture that for person-to-person document transfers, email is far better than faxing, which can easily result in illegible pages, printing errors, faxing errors, security problems on the receiving side ("hmm, this looks interesting"), and a bevy of other problems.

Smart companies don't bother with paper-based fax machines and instead opt for document centers that have scanning abilities in addition to fax capabilities, although they're still beholden to accept faxes. If they're smart, they'll employ a fixed fax server that has four, six, or two dozen analog lines attached and the ability to take incoming faxes and turn them into PDFs and email them internally (or, sadly, ship them directly to a printer). That's still better than a cranky old fax machine sitting in the corner with a pile of forgotten incoming faxes in the hopper. Heck, you can check out any number of companies (like GreenFax) that handle all the fax-to-email capabilities you'd possibly want.

We've been promised the paperless office for decades. Every time someone jettisons a fax machine, that promise gets a little closer to reality. Every time a company omits fax numbers from its business cards and website, it gets even closer. Every time someone sends a 50-page analog fax of a document they just printed out from a PDF on their desktop, it gets further away.

If something as appallingly stupid as the fax machine can live on, it makes you wonder how we make progress at all. Old habits die hard. It just goes to show you: Bad technology generally isn't the problem; it's the people who persist in using that technology rather than embracing far superior alternatives.

This story, "Why the fax machine refuses to die," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Paul Venezia's The Deep End blog at InfoWorld

Tips from the trenches to keep your copier career on track

From: http://www.copiercareers.com/newsletters/newsletter_September_2011.shtml

According to a recent survey of over 5,000 American workers by BIGresearch, most people in this country expect the economy to (continue to) get worse before it gets better. Here are the top seven findings from the survey:

1. Eighty-nine percent of workers believe they won’t get a raise this year. Only 10 percent of Americans think their pay will keep up with cost-of-living increases.
   
2. Seventy percent of workers are either “very” or “somewhat” worried that the U.S. will slip into a second recession. Eighteen percent of workers surveyed are neutral on the question, and only 12 percent say they’re not at all worried that another recession will begin this year.
   
3. Women are slightly more worried about recession than men. Seventy-two percent of female workers are either “very” or “somewhat” worried about a double-dip recession, compared to 68 percent of men.
   
4. Most people are planning to cut back on spending to offset rising costs. Only 7 percent of survey respondents said they do not plan to change their spending habits. Seventy-one percent of respondents say they’ll control spending by buying only what they need; 63 percent plan to lower expenditures by driving less.
   
5. Female workers are better prepared to cut back on household spending than male workers. More women than men say they are willing to deal with rising costs and stagnant salaries by buying only what they need, driving less, spending less on clothing, comparison shopping, sticking to a strict budget, buying generic products, and spending less on groceries.
   
6. Three out of four Americans have little or no confidence that the government’s economic policies will have a beneficial effect. Confidence in government measures was lowest in March, and has been declining steadily since June of 2010.
   
7. The Federal Reserve’s suggestion that printing more money will help the economy is not popular. Over 60 percent of respondents believe that printing more currency will hurt the economy in the long run; only 18 percent think this move would boost the economy.

MFP Security Issues

MFP Security Issues

You may have smart-card access securing the entrance to your building, encrypted network login, and an IP filter protecting access to the network, but do you have adequate safeguards when it comes to managing information flowing in and out of your company via your scanners and MFPs?
One of the issues surrounding MFP scan-to-email systems is the disassociation of e-mail communication from the core user’s e-mail log. By integrating directly via Exchange or Notes, a company will route e-mails through the MFP, but the log is recorded against the user's e-mail account, as if they had sent the email from their desktop.
Even more important is the fact that attachments recorded with the email log do not always come into play with MFP scan-to-email routed directly through the SMTP mail server.

Thus, without integrating through Exchange or Notes, even if the Chief Security Office (CSO) knew that confidential information had been leaked via a scan-to-email route, he or she would have no means of identifying the culprit.

The first step to limiting this security risk is to force authentication on all communication and scanning devices, thus creating an audit trail. The process is simple, in essence, requiring the administrator to set up a capture phase, a processing phase, and a route. The capture phase is the MFP or scanner. The destination route can be the e-mail delivery system, FTP folder, desktop location, etc.
Administrators can set up all scanning workflows to follow a set procedure, such as:
• User authenticates at the device, instantly starting the audit trail.
• Scanning is carried out. • Image is fed into an OCR application for conversion into a searchable text format. The searchable file is passed to a customized program that performs a security content filter/sweep looking for “hot” words, codes, names, etc.• If no “hot” words are detected, the data continues on its way to its final destination.

How do you define and MPS Ready Device?

Please help Defining specifications of MPS Compliant devices

The report from Nubeprint shows that not all devices are MPS compliant, e.g. enabled to managed 100% remotely and 100% vendor MPS program independent.

Which functionallity makes a device a top MPS Compliant device?
- ability to measure toner levels
- ability to watch status and receive service request
- ability to read machines identification (name, serial, brand, ...)
- ability to measure print/copy/scan meters
- ability to measure paper sizes and simplex/duplex
- ability to configure the machine (everything) remotely
- ability to measure energy usage
- ability to take over the screen remotely
- ability to be used in independent MPS programs (public MIB)