Print.IT Reseller - issue 68

01732 759725 44 PRINT PREDICTIONS ...continued be included as part of an overall package throughout the year. Although it has been well publicised, the fact that 2020 will see BT stop any further ISDN being supplied will drive further demand for cloud hosted telephony, an area that many print resellers are benefiting from through great incremental growth. Additionally, 2020 will continue to see digitisation of the production print market. This trend will gain further traction with increased activity from manufacturers and larger dealers investing in this area to capitalise on the growth. In summary, the print reseller market is still attractive and continues to reinvent itself. This is proven from the increased interest from traditionally IT-focussed resellers looking to move into the MPS space. www.asl-group.co.uk Phil Madders, Managing Director, PAE Business n AI: The amount of information that we must contend with in today’s office is growing exponentially. It is attached to emails, – buried in spreadsheets, encompassed in the plethora of applications we use to run our businesses. In theory this boom in data should help us to make better, faster and smarter decisions. Only problem is that there is so much to consider it is difficult to process it and see the issues that matter. It can be overwhelming. To address this, analytics, dashboarding and BI will continue to grow, but it will be linked to practical implementations of artificial intelligence. AI is becoming more mainstream. Microsoft has been advertising its AI project involving thousands of motion cameras deployed in the Himalayas to track Snow Leopards. Firstly it had to teach the program to recognise a snow leopard, then put the processing power in place to crunch the thousands of images received to identify which image was a snow leopard, and then report on this to the scientists to turn the data into meaningful analysis. Brilliant, in its simplicity, it shows what AI is about. At PAE we are using the work we have done on predictive modelling for usage volumes into an AI application to see if we can predict accurately requirements on toners, spares, engineer resource and supplies. We see this as a practical application of the experience we have built in analytics and the experience we have working with our partners. n GDPR: is moving from a concept to an everyday business practice and is having an impact upon day to day business activities. It has had some strange side-affects. I have been engaged in discussing the tracking of fax traffic. Now if these predictions had been related to 1983, I would have been prepared for that – but 2020! However, the facts are self-evident – 50 billion pages worldwide sent last year – a forecast of 11 per cent growth and 1.6 billion of those pages in the UK. The reason being that fax is now recognised as one of the most secure formats for protecting data and providing audit trails. Very difficult to hack and manipulate – its popularity is set to grow, but in the electronic format rather than a piece of hardware. If in any doubt just watch this space. n Data sovereignty: the restriction of data leaving a certain geographical location – be it the EU or in a recent request we had, the data had to stay in one country. Will it have an impact on SMEs in the UK? The most likely source of enquiry will relate to the provisioning of cloud services and where the data resides. I expect this will be a question that is asked increasingly during 2020, especially if Brexit happens. n Millennial and Generation Z factor: will grow in terms of influence within the workplace. The phrase ‘screenagers’ is very suitable for the first generation that has been brought up with information on tap, fed via a free app or the internet. They expect information in the workplace to be as readily available, services to be provided on a SaaS model and to be constantly updated. This is a massive challenge to the more traditional workplace and the practices that have evolved. Add to this that the competition that companies face in recruiting and retaining this sector of the workforce it is easy to see their influence growing and accelerating the change in the workplace. clients want to print should be our focus, because the process which delivers printed output is where the true cost lies: we must focus attention on this business issue to create a value proposition to help our clients work in smarter ways, rather than just watch as page costs continue to reduce inexorably. We must therefore broaden our skills and capabilities to include as a minimum an understanding of process automation in order to remain relevant. We need to identify which of our colleagues want to learn the skills necessary to meet this challenge, consider new hires and also build relationships with trusted partners. This is one way to win new business and offset declining profitability in core services. It’s a fantastic and exciting opportunity! www.commercial.co.uk Nigel Allen, Marketing Director, ASL As we approach 2020, there is a lot of uncertainty from a political point of view with Brexit still not resolved. This naturally leads to unrest in business and planning as well as making it even more difficult to predict what might happen next year! I believe that the demand for products to be sold as a service will continue and develop even further. There is still a huge opportunity for print resellers such as ASL to take advantage of this trend, as we have been service-led for many years. The trick is the ability to offer other products and services within the mix. The market definitely exists, and I expect more unified comms and IT services to Nigel Allen Phil Madders