While the talk of MPS has been around for some time, where do Indian enterprises stand in terms of adoption?
Leaving out the recent hiccups, from a mid-term perspective, Indian organizations are better placed than their counterparts abroad. Because they are scaling up, so almost every year they have to shed the old legacies and practices and adopt new practices that have been tried elsewhere. The challenge for Indian companies is: How much ahead of the curve should they be? Because the environment is a little bit unpredictable now, it is difficult for them to predict it as accurately as they were earlier able to do.
Most Indian organizations find managed services, of which managed print services is a part, to be very relevant for them. At some point, they have to outsource certain services because this is a very cost-effective way to scale up. From that perspective, MPS is very timely and relevant.
The MPS space is still dominated by provision of hardware and supplies, with very little in terms of software-defined rights, workflow, etc. What is your opinion on that?
Now it is a question of how much holistically are organizations studying their businesses and the organization’s requirements. It is easy for business heads and CIOs and CFOs to understand their existing business and past legacies—but it is very difficult for them to see how the business is going to happen in future. Some of the organizations which are large and have experience and competencies to plan out are the ones that have holistically understood that hardware is the last thing [they should worry about]. The important thing for them is to enhance efficiency and become more cost-effective and therefore look at solutions that are software-oriented and also integrated in the long run.
What has been your experience of meeting with CIOs?
Let me say that there are three kinds of CIOs that we meet. One category of CIOs are those that are still in the old paradigm and are definitely not the early adopters. They might be knowing of other CIOs who have implemented an MPS and heard about its benefits, but they are still skeptical or struggling to come out with more clarity.
The second category comprises CIOs who have gone through that “hump” in their mind and are convinced [about MPS]. So now they are only struggling with the question of which solution provider should they go with.
The third category of CIOs are already our partners and are now ready to have more intelligent discussions on how they can benefit more from the solutions that we provide. Some of these CIOs have implemented MPS in some part of their organization and may want to scale it up to the whole organization. This category of CIOs is where we are learning the most from. Their feedback often helps us to redefine our value proposition.
Intuitively, MPS should bring down the number of printers companies buy. So why do vendors like Canon promote it?
Because we are in the business of printing and not printers. Our business model is that every click that you do, it means profit for Canon. So if you buy a hundred of our machines, we are not happy if you are not printing enough. But if you buy, say, only 50 printers but your printing goes up many times, then it is good business for us. Having said that, in the new world of green IT and electronic communication, printing is also undergoing a lot of change. So we are positioning managed printing as the most responsible printing and not reckless printing…Now our business model got tweaked a bit by saying that not just every click that you do gives us money, but that every responsible click that you do—which was necessitated by the absolute essential thing that you need to do—under the architecture created by us that helps you do that, is good enough for us. And that “good enough” is our business model now.