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opinion
20 Print.IT Reseller
As if the MPS space wasn’t in enough
of a mess with everybody scrambling
to get their share of contracted pages
in a down-turn economy, a little
talked about page-killer is coming
and it goes by the name of BYOD
(Bring Your Own Device).
There was a time when IT departments
mandated that employees use only company-
provided equipment. The reasoning was
simple enough: computers and cell phones
were expensive and hard to manage so
corporate standards were critical if cost and
complexity were to be kept under control.
Of course, in the olden-days (a mere five
years ago by the calendar but a lifetime in
terms of technology creep) most employees
didn’t own an average of three computing
devices as they do today. The last two
years have seen dramatic shifts in personal
computing options: Apple’s iOS and Google’s
Android products have made Tablets easy
enough for a 4-year old to use and affordable
even for those on meagre budgets.
Introducing BYOD
Companies all over the world are now
allowing employees to bring in their own
tablets and smartphones for use in the office.
Why? That’s an easy one to answer:
1. Savings:
Corporations can get rid of
capital expenses related to kitting out their
staff and the maintenance/replacement costs
that go with it.
2. Access:
Have you ever met a teenager
who didn’t have a smartphone on their
person 24x7? BYOD gives corporations a
sneaky way of increasing their contact with
employees.
3. Adapting to the New Reality:
There
was a time when most people didn’t have a
smartphone or a tablet. Although companies
cannot yet insist that employees provide their
own smartphone or tablet, the day is fast
approaching when they will.
I’ve spoken to a lot of MPS dealers who
think that when the economy gets back on
track BYOD will be DOA and the golden tap
of unlimited printing will once again pour
forth and make us all rich. Think again: the
adoption of BYOD has largely been driven
by a downturn economy and that’s created
a new appetite to do more with less that is
likely to stick around for good.
I recently had a chance to discuss BYOD
with Edward Crowley, Global Strategy
Consultant at Photizo Group, LLC and one
of the ‘thought leaders’ in the coming age
of digital workflow. He said: “Over 60% of
the Fortune 500 have an iPad deployment
or pilot underway. All you have to do is look
around most meetings and increasingly
a majority of the attendees have an iPad
or other tablet device instead of a PC or
even a pad of paper. It’s hard to find an
organisation where this isn’t happening.”
For Crowley, BYOD is likely to be the
biggest disruptor to the MPS page base that
providers of Managed Print Services will
need to milk for every opportunity. “Perhaps
the bigger opportunity is to find ways to use
tablets to actually improve the customer’s
workflow. This is more of a professional
services engagement, and it takes a significant
amount of BI (Business Intelligence) skill and
understanding of the customer’s environment,
but it’s a great growth opportunity,” he said.
Workflow solutions come in all shapes
and sizes. Some of them like the nebulous
‘Document Management Solution’ always
seem just out of reach for everybody bar
enterprise-sized accounts. But there are
much easier workflow solutions already
in the market. A simple and inexpensive
one is to use an iPad for remote desktop
access. I’m doing it right now. I am working
with Microsoft Word. The application and
document are both housed on my computer
back at the office, but I’m in a Starbucks
more than 100 kilometres away.
I use Splashtop to accomplish this:
I have Splashtop 2 on my iPad and Splashtop
Stream on my main desktop running
Windows 8. I simply log in on my iPad
and get instant access to my Windows 8
Desktop: every document, every application,
EVERYTHING. For larger organisations with
their own private networks, there is an
enterprise version that uses a central server
within the customer environment.
What does this have to do with MPS?
Quite simply, it reduces the need to print.
If employees can use their iPad as if it were
their desktop computer, but one that they
can take anywhere and everywhere, they
can sit in a boardroom and use the iPad
for viewing/reading documents instead of
printing them. This simple App alone could
reduce printing by 30% overnight.
30% down
Let’s look at the maths (US dollars, sorry!).
Say we have a customer printing 4 million
pages per annum and we charge them
$0.0125 per mono page. Our total annual
revenue on this account is a tidy $50,000. We
like this $50,000 per year in revenue, a lot.
Enter the page-killing iPad running
Splashtop or some other remote desktop
app and 30% of our pages ($15,000 of our
revenue!) vanishes because people start
using tablets in the boardroom instead of
paper. Who on earth would want that to
happen? Your customer of course! And as
we know, the customer is always right.
This is bad news for anyone with a
significant page base under MPS contracts.
But don’t lose heart: we’ve all seen this
movie before and have gone on to prosper.
Anybody remember getting rich off fax
machines? Anybody make their mark in the
world selling analogue copiers? Then the
‘network’ and ‘email’ came along and the
need to be ‘connected’ drove incredible
change. So we adopted MPS and kept ahead
of the curve. Now BYOD is messing up the
MPS model. We have survived disruptive
transitions in the past and we’ll do it again
provided we keep our wits about us.
So, if we’re going to lose $15,000 in
page revenue from BYOD, how do we get it
back? We provide the MPS BYOD solution
and generate income in one of two ways:
Companies
all over the
world are
now allowing
employees
to bring in
their own
tablets and
smartphones...
The Coming Storm that is BYOD:
MPS Ponderings From Across The Pond
By West McDonald, FocusMPS
continued...