Depending on your perspective—or more aptly, depending on how your business or industry fared—2020 was feast or famine. SaaS platforms such as Zoom and Okta feasted, enabling remote work by unshackling businesses from the chains of legacy IT infrastructure. Others starved, while some escaped with a faint pulse by doing what it took to adapt and survive.
As the world begins to see light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, businesses that weathered the storm must look forward and ask two questions:
- What changes must we make right now to capitalize on new customer behaviors?
- What long-term moves must we make to continue thriving three to five years from now?
This leads us to the topic at hand: the print industry, specifically managed print services (MPS). What did the industry as a whole learn from the past year? What immediate changes can be made to continue delivering valuable services that customers need? And what long-term pivots should MPS providers be considering to complete the metamorphosis from MPS to MDS-managed digital services?
If your MPS business model at the start of 2020 was based predominantly on the volume of pages printed, toner refills or multifunction device maintenance, then the year of COVID-19 was likely a struggle. Simply put: no printing, no money. Many MPS businesses attempted to pivot to “home printing” services, erroneously thinking print volumes would simply shift from the office workspace to the home. In reality, as workspaces shifted, people simply figured out how to work with less paper, and thus 2020 became a microcosm of what’s coming: the digital (paperless) workspace.
As we dive into the solution of how MPS providers can survive, both now and in the future, we offer a metaphoric word of caution. As people make their way back to physical office workspaces, print volumes will naturally rise in 2021. Some might see this as a return to normalcy, believing all is well in the MPS world again. This is akin to finding yourself in the eye of a hurricane, where the sun temporarily shines, the winds calm and all seems beautiful. But something big is looming, and we can’t just take shelter from this looming digital hurricane—we need to learn how to ride the massive digital wave it will undoubtedly create.
Before a more strategic pivot towards pure digital transformation solutions can be made to sustain long-term growth, we must look back on 2020 and pinpoint three specific areas for short-term and necessary MPS business pivots.
Cloud managed or serverless printing
There hasn’t been a bigger buzzword in the IT world over the last 15 years than “cloud.” In the world of printing (apart from a few disruptive ISVs who innovated on cloud technology early on), most industry players have continued to rely on dedicated infrastructure to enable printing and print management. This isn’t what customers needed in 2020; they required easily accessible cloud services to manage their print environments, irrespective of the decreasing print volumes.
Requiring IT professionals to be on-prem, or to connect to print servers and their print management applications via virtual private networks (VPN) in order to keep the printing lights on, is an old-world IT approach that simply didn’t scale. Last year was less about fancy quota management, reporting or control panel features, and more about IT departments needing solutions that could be accessed and managed anywhere from a web browser. Service providers who could deliver serverless solutions, which are inherently more secure and more highly available, had something of immense value to offer customers. MPS providers who had true multi-tenant SaaS print management in their portfolio saw an increased demand for managed software services—and this demand had nothing to do with print volumes. Serverless was the answer.
“Zero Trust” Enabled Printing
A more recent buzzword is Zero Trust, which can seem nebulous and confusing, but has very real implications to new customer behaviors, even with printing. As more and more customers access cloud applications from public networks, old perimeter security models become irrelevant and user identity becomes paramount. Imagine a customer who can only print if they are:
- On the corporate network, behind the firewall
- Connected to a legacy active directory domain
- Required to print jobs by routing through a print server
Those three conditions are based on the old paradigm of physical location and infrastructure. Managed service providers who can overcome these restraints will offer a more flexible, more secure and less infrastructure-laden solution. What if a customer could authenticate with a cloud identity solution such as Okta and securely access any corporate printer from any public network without traditional on-prem servers? This is another valuable service customers need today, irrespective of print volumes.
Touchless Access
When customers do come into the office to print or retrieve print jobs, one of the concerns could still be multiple people touching the same control panel. What if any print job could be retrieved from any printer through a universal, user-friendly mobile application? Managed service providers who offer this bring something of real value, which again is unrelated to print volumes.
Do you recognize a trend here? It’s not about printing, but all about the simplification and elimination of legacy infrastructure. It’s the ease of access to (and management of) cloud applications, the high availability and secure nature of multi-tenant SaaS and the reduction of help desk calls from frustrated users. None of these services has anything to do with print volumes, and they all deliver immediate customer value.
MPS providers can make these pivots today by incorporating the right cloud-native solutions into their portfolio of services. Once they do, their customers can focus valuable technology resources towards digital transformation projects—the most exciting opportunity for MPS providers—to make the ultimate pivot to managed digital services (MDS). MDS providers will be able to deploy and manage capabilities such as data capture, e-forms, workflow, e-signature, content management and more. Finding solutions that encapsulate these digital capabilities into a single integrated platform will allow these next-gen MDS providers to truly guide their customers along their digital transformation journeys. And just as the MPS pivots suggested above, managed digital services will need to be serverless and built on modern Zero Trust models.
