HP offers value to the mid market through beyond the box printing and imaging solutions. By Heena Jhingan
With new use cases developing for adoption of printing and imaging solutions by SMBs, Hewlett-Packard India has launched five solutions to meet the needs of this market.
The set of new solutions, including ePrint Enterprise mobile printing, EcoSMART Fleet, Imaging and Printing Security Center, Access Control Professional and Access Control Express, claim to deliver higher efficiency and cost savings for the SMBs.
Gurpreet Kanwal, Country Business Manager, PMPS and Solutions, PPS, HP India, believed that sophisticated solutions such as HP ePrint were earlier focused on large enterprises, and have been implemented by the likes of the Essar group. However, the efficiencies enabled by these solutions could now be extended to the mid-market as well.
Nitin Hiranandani, Director, Printing Systems, PPS, HP India, said that SMBs were in fact, fairly large commercial organizations that had IT needs quite identical to the large enterprises, though at a much lower scale and cost and that this was what encouraged them to look at mid-sized accounts with such offerings.
Content explosion, mobility and new Web-driven usage are some of the factors that are resulting in investments being made in printers. According to market researchers, the market for the digital content is expected to be about $55 bn by 2013 and the printing market should grow to $175 bn.
Forrester estimated that more than 20% of the information workers spend nearly three hours of their work hours on smartphones building a case for the uptake of mobile printing solutions.
On an average nearly 5% of the enterprise revenues are spent on the company’s annual documents costs. Every $1 spent on printing a page, involves another $9 to manage it, something that can be construed as an extravagant exercise.
In a scenario, where nearly 6% of the company’s revenues are spent on imaging and printing, such open technology based and customizable solutions can be very effective.
BSFI, manufacturing and retail are the key segments where the potential mid-sized clients are in abundance and these solutions can be very popular
Since these solutions are built on the company’s Open Extensibility Platform, a device-independent technology that allows users to work across a fleet of both old and new devices, these fit the needs of the SMBs.
“These solutions bring higher flexibility for customization. These solutions propose investment protection as these support backward and forward compatibility. They also enable easy manageability and powerful workflow engine,” Kanwal reasoned.
Kanwal believed that, though the Indian printing market was competitive when it comes to multifunction printing devices, however, it is now time to bring higher value to the mid-market through these solutions and look beyond boxes.
However, venturing into the mid market is not as easy at it might appear and would require rigorous training and close engagement with partners.
For this, Kanwal informed, the company has designed a partner education plan. “We will basically, have three engagement models—direct touch, outsourced/extended salesforce and telecalling, which will be more focused at the tail-end clients,” she explained.
The company has not specified any account list for the partner education program as they expect a lot of churn here. “The basic criteria for being a part of the program is that that they should have the skill and mind set to further build on the applications,” she stressed.
The small and mid, is indisputably a slice of the market that is witnessing newer investments on deployments of IT solution. The company has tried to package the solutions to cater to the SMBs by allowing interoperability and flexibility to build further on the existing apparatus. Whether SMBs will bite considering the lack of IT skill-sets in this sector, remains to be seen. Partner reskilling will prove crucial here.