If at first you don't succeed... More than a decade after managed services for PCs and servers began to take hold in small businesses, nearly 75 percent of those companies still don't leverage managed print services, according to Photizo Group.
Eager to jumpstart the market, Xerox in July launched multiple MPS tools designed to help partners assess and optimize, secure and integrate, and automate and simplify customer environments.
Those Xerox tools include:
- Enhanced Managed Supplies Service, which offers 25 percent margins to partners.
- An e-Commerce Storefront for partners to order and renew assessment tools and services to analyze a company’s IT infrastructure in order to develop and sell a smart MPS program.
- MPS Application Programming Interface (API) to help partners integrate billing and other business operations with Xerox.
- Xerox Digital Alternatives, which is a desktop and mobile assistant technology that automates paper-based workflows.
Generally speaking, Xerox and other printer companies have successfully sold managed print services directly to midmarket and enterprise customers. But small business success has been harder to come by.
Among the reasons:
- HP, arguably the dominant printer supplier to small businesses, hasn't really made a consistent managed print push to partners.
- Hardware as a service (HaaS) -- which was supposed to bundle servers, desktops and printers as a service -- never gained critical mass adoption in the channel.
Still, Xerox has consistently introduced new managed print services tools for its partners.
