Print.IT Reseller - issue 78

01732 759725 42 VOX POP 12 months ago when PrintIT Reseller invited the industry to share their print predictions for 2020, it’s fair to say that no-one could have predicted the global pandemic that impacted every industry and business sector. Now as the year draws to a close, here’s a selection of some of the best-known OEMs’ thoughts on what 2021 will hold for the print and IT sectors Print predictions: part one Joe Doyle, Group Marketing Director, KYOCERA Document Solutions: Customers are in business continuity mode; focused on cost curtailment, remote working and maintaining essential operations. As the restrictions ease and business picks up in 2021, their attention will shift to recovering revenues, rebuilding operations and accelerating digital transformation. In a short space of time organisations have adapted to survive. Some are thriving, many are struggling and all have had to enable remote working, adopt new business models and invoke business continuity plans. Next year, companies will increase their use of tools such as Microsoft Teams to ‘sweat the asset’ and extract maximum value from it by combining it with things like their existing telephony systems to boost productivity and efficiency. Also, in the rapid rush to online tools such as MS Teams and the Google Suite in 2020, more companies will be looking for additional tools to back-up and restore the data that is stored on these platforms but which is not saved by the platform itself. We also believe that the move to the cloud will be accelerated, with companies needing to optimise and attain all the benefits that the cloud brings, even quicker. Staying with IT, organisations will need to focus their attention more on their core competencies so will look to work with companies for professional services, utilising managed service providers as ‘virtual’ team members to support them with their new IT projects and goals. Organisations will look to balance their print fleets so as to accommodate greater numbers of employees home working on a more fixed basis, so we’ll see more A4 devices being shipped. At the other end of the scale, production print is set to grow with demand for inkjet increasing significantly in 2021. Finally, the rapid growth in the amount of information being produced within organisations and the way it’s being managed is impacting directly on organisational efficiency, employee productivity, IT infrastructure complexity, and most importantly, profitability. With many organisations downsizing their workforce in 2020, 2021 will see them needing to automate processes and information structure through utilising content services. Content services is about removing manual processes, replacing them with a streamlined digitised workflow that integrates into other systems, such as CRM or enterprise resource planning (ERP). It can help lower costs, improve customer satisfaction and massively improve the efficiency of an organisation.” kyoceradocumentsolutions.co.uk With many organisations downsizing their workforce in 2020, 2021 will see them needing to automate processes and information structure through utilising content services Jason Cort Joe Doyle