Print.IT Reseller - issue 68

PRINT PREDICTIONS 01732 759725 42 As 2019 draws to a close, PrintIT Reseller invited some of the industry’s best- known vendors to share their thoughts on what 2020 holds for the print and IT sectors Print Predictions 2020 Instead, it’s going to make customers pay more if they buy a device that can take someone else’s consumables. How’s that going to change things for the channel? It’s always good to be able to offer customers a choice of course, but what you offer may now depend more on the kind of reputation and relationships you want to build with customers and with suppliers. Another rising trend for 2020 will be sustainability. There is a lot of talk about this now. End-user customers want to know about the carbon footprint and environmental impact of print and IT solutions. Everyone wants to move towards circular economies, so as well as a products’ green credentials, trade- ins and recycling will become more important. We expect managed services to continue growing in 2020, not only with print but also in areas like back-up, security, networking and infrastructure. This is very closely tied into the steady migration we are seeing to cloud services and to subscription business models for IT. This is not confined to software anymore – there are many more device- as-a-service and hardware-as-a-service offerings out there now. In terms of vendor trends, it’s interesting to see that – as far as our business is concerned at least – that HP has consistently been our number-one print vendor, but their market share has decreased by 14.3%, mainly due to a fall in supplies sales. Canon has seen the biggest growth in the past year, increasing market share by 4.4% to 14%. In 2020, everyone in the channel will need to think about how the changes in the way technology is being used and consumed will impact the value they deliver, and the way they do business and interact with customers. The whole channel is undergoing a transformation and that will bring many challenges, but also many opportunities. It will be important to recognise and adapt to the former and seize the latter. www.synaxon.co.uk Martin Randall, Sales and Marketing Director, Vision 2020 will see more uptake in a lot of the already prevalent market trends. Whilst cloud-based technology is now widely accepted, we have yet to see fully established SaaS-based print management platforms. Relatively new vendors like OneQ and EveryonePrint are continuing to cause disruption with their respective cloud and hybrid hosting models for output management which is putting pressure on the more established players to develop and differentiate their offerings. With the momentum this has gathered, 2020 certainly looks like the year that the shift to cloud in this space, and in turn subscription-based licensing will become established. As the ‘as a service’ model continues to gather pace in general, print hardware vendors will continue to innovate and find ways to benefit from the subscription wars by launching more of their own proprietary app-based system connectors and integrations. And, as the mind-set of buyers continues to shift from traditional contractual options, more fluid agreements in all aspects of print and document solutions will also take shape. Aside from this, we’re also still seeing an exponential increase in client engagement around digital transformation using content services platforms which looks set to continue to increase as a business priority in 2020. Undoubtedly also we will see more consolidation within the market place and shouldn’t be surprised by more collaboration between IT and print partners. www.visionplc.co.uk Mike Barron, Managing Director, SYNAXON UK It’s a really interesting time in print as well as the wider IT channel. Resellers, distributors and vendors are all having to re-evaluate their roles, the value they deliver and the nature of their channel partnerships. We’ll see this continue and gather pace in 2020. The idea that HP floated recently, at the Canalys Channels Forum, whereby it would adjust the sale price of its print devices depending on whether or not they were capable of running with only genuine HP, or with third-party ink or toner cartridges, was one illustration of how things are changing. For a long time, it’s been known and accepted that print vendors make more off the sale of consumables than they do from selling the print and MFP devices themselves. But the after-market has since become saturated with alternative replacement cartridges. It seems HP has decided that it’s not going to win this battle by fighting the imitators through its legal and marketing departments. Mike Barron Martin Randall In 2020, everyone in the channel will need to think about how the changes in the way technology is being used and consumed