PRINT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE
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cloud native or a premise-based solution. “The important thing is having the flexibility to offer a cloud native product, but also understand the benefits and the pros and cons of hosting a once premise based product in the cloud environment. “Broadly speaking, I think the biggest change I’ve seen in the last a period has been the desire for our end users to have a cloud hosted version. Probably boosted by COVID, we’ve seen a real acceptance of the benefits of a cloud hosted offering, and these are SaaS-based propositions, and I think we’ve seen the print management software naturally fall into a cloud offering. “When we talk about ‘aaS’ the print industry has been doing that for a long time. The natural way for resellers to go on to sell software is as a service, and cloud is the vehicle to do that and, frankly, it’s what our customers are asking for.” Selling Software With an appetite for cloud services and a distributed workforce, software that helps businesses have sight of how these solutions are being used sounds like an easy sale. Davies said that “context is key”, with Naser adding that resellers should be open to a conversation with customers before forcing solutions on them. “Resellers should follow a consultative sales approach when selling print management software to customers,” said Naser. “This involves understanding the customer’s needs and pain points, identifying
the features and benefits of the software that address those needs, and presenting a tailored solution that meets the customer’s specific requirements.” But those requirements are ever changing. As Pearce points out, one of the key benefits of cloud technology is that it is “scalable”. That always has connotations with getting bigger, but working habits change. “By having a cloud based system where you can simply bolt devices on, or bolt users on, and take them off, rather than buying these cumbersome upfront contracts is definitely the way that I would go.” With chat of bolt ons, Silvester also said that he sees print becoming amalgamated with other consumables purchasers need, such as coffee, adding that, with the use of print management software, print can be one of the less demanding utilities in the office. “IT departments see print as a necessary evil. They want to have a printer, press a button and it to just work. “In order to do that, we can use data to save time and prevent problems before they arise. We used to do preventative maintenance on all equipment, where if we’d send somebody out to fix a machine, that engineer would also look at all the machines in that location and if some of them needed preemptive maintenance, we do that as well. “That increases the mean time between engineer visits, and then that data is reported back to the print software where they can measure the time between fixes on devices with engineers.”
Steve Pearce group head of marketing Kyocera Document Solutions UK
kyoceradocument solutions.co.uk
IT departments see print as a necessary evil. They want to have a printer, press a button and it to just work. “ ”
printinthechannel.co.uk
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