“Déjà Vu All Over Again”

To quote Yogi Berra, this was my reaction when I recently attended a session on Managed Print Services at the CompTIA conference.

“One Day we Will”

To set the stage, the speaker was a nationally recognized leader in the world of Managed Print Services. Shortly after the presentation began, I heard the statement “one day we will” followed by a number of action statements laying out advantages of, and benefits resulting from, a managed print services program. These were client focused – musing, or maybe wishing, that one day the industry would provide these to their clients. I was taken aback by this setup phrase and the list that followed.

The Surprise

This presentation took me back to a decade ago when the industry was spending a great deal of time and energy defining, and re-defining what managed print services was, or should be. Bloggers and chat site participants offered, and often argued over these definitions. Back then it caused me to post the “Blind Men and the Elephant” tale on this blog. So here I am, ten years later and listening to an industry expert surmising that one day, managed print services vendors would provide these advantages and benefits for their clients. I could not help but wonder what has been going on for the past decade, I thought these things defined managed print services, are they not what service providers do for their clients?

The Next Three Days

This session really set my agenda for the rest of the conference as I set out to understand what other folks, closely tied to managed print services, were experiencing. I had lengthy conversations with software vendors, analysts, industry journalists and service providers. I began each of these conversations describing my reaction to what I had heard and solicited their opinions on both the content and my reaction. I was trying to determine whether I was totally out of touch with the state of the industry today.

My Findings

Without exception, each of the individuals, or groups I talked to, confirmed what the speaker had inferred; that the vast majority of service providers used managed print services as a marketing strategy but rarely delivered on their pre-sale promises.

The software vendors explained how dealers would leverage their products to entice a prospect, but only occasionally implement it in the final solution. The general consensus was that they liked to talk about reducing pages and expense during the sales process but were loath to do so once they captured the revenue stream. This seems to be especially true when it comes to implementing rules-based-printing to reduce the number of those highly profitable color pages.

The industry analysts I talked to were unanimous in their observations that few service providers ever delivered on most of the promises of their print management program. The most generous opinion was that twenty percent of the providers delivered on their commitments while the most cynical put that number at ten percent.

Back to the Beginning

It has been quite some time since I published here, or attended an industry event. My last posting was titled “The “M” in MPS – Are all Vendors Alike”; I decided to attend the CompTIA event to see what was happening in managed print services beyond my view. I was interested in knowing what had changed since this last posting.

I need to clarify what I said at the beginning about being surprised. What actually surprised me was that I was not surprised. I went to this event to explore whether what I see in my world is representative of the whole – it appears it may be!

My personal findings are that there are only a handful of managed print services vendors who provide any significant level of management. This includes nationally recognized vendors who have put millions into some very convincing marketing efforts.

To quote a client who I recently took over from one of these vendors, “you have done more in three months than they did in the past three years.”

Maybe the difference is that I do not sell hardware or supplies, which means I do not have the conflicting motives that continue to dominate managed print services.

I think there may be a lesson in that!

For more information please feel free to contact me at (ghawkins@buscomgroup.com ) at your convenience.