Breaking the costs barrier

The global economic outlook being choppy as it is, a majority of businesses have strategically decided to shift their investments from a capital expenditure model (capex) to the operational expenditure (opex) one. This shift is more pronounced in areas like information technology and is partly responsible for the ever-growing relevance and interest of businesses in cloud computing. Owned versus rented infrastructure is a keen discussed and debated topic in corporate boardrooms today.

At the same time, businesses are spending ever-growing amount of resources on document and content management. They are printing more documents than ever. Gartner had estimated in 2003 that businesses would spend between 1-3% of their annual revenues on their document output equipment fleets. For large enterprises, expenditure involved in printing and copying documents can therefore run into crores.

In managed print services (MPS), there exists a model that allows business organisations to achieve the dual objectives of shifting their imaging and printing fleet infrastructure to an opex model, and at the same time reduce their document output costs. MPS also allows organisations to integrate imaging and printing into their overall IT infrastructure strategies (particularly in the case of cloud adoption).

No wonder then we see a growing momentum towards MPS. Gartner predicts that MPS is accelerating growth to the point that more than 50% of large organisations worldwide will employ MPS by 2015. The research firm further says that this significant and projected growth is evidence that organisations must consider implementing MPS to reduce capital and supplies cost as well as improve document workflows.

Gartner also says that the MPS market is growing rapidly. A study by research firm Photizo Group found that Asia Pacific is the fastest growing MPS region, containing six of the top ten fastest growth countries worldwide, led by India. According to InfoTrends projections, the managed print services revenue opportunity on a global basis is expected to grow from $12.3 billion in 2009 to $25.5 billion in 2014. All regions will demonstrate double-digit increases with Asia Pacific showing the strongest potential with an 18% compound annual growth rate, with India at the forefront.

... contd.

ALSO READ

‘We see a huge potential for domain names in India’

To take notes or not to