Printer performance

Printers are all too often overlooked in an IT purchasing strategy – and this is a great shame. Your printers directly produce the material customers and business partners see, and they also represent a large and mostly unmanaged cost to your business.

Printers are easily managed and the decision criteria can be easily understood. Printer choices are being driven by the recession and a new environmental awareness – backed up increasingly by regulations.

“Companies do want to reduce costs, but they'll be doing that by applying efficiency practices.”
-Steven Mast

That's why printer makers are responding to these demands, and the market is moving into a new phase. Users will be choosing to have fewer printers, but larger, more efficient and smarter printers. They may increasingly also choose to buy a print service instead of running and managing all.

If you understand the direction of the market, and the specifications of existing printers, and if you can calculate the output you require, you can compare the likely total cost of ownership for a range of models, and find the one that suits your needs best. Money may be tight, but people are still prepared to pay for quality printing, says Dell's Senior Manager of SMB printers, Steven Mast. "Companies do want to reduce costs, but they'll be doing that by applying efficiency practices," he says.

The recession has hit many printer manufacturers hard, as companies put capital acquisitions on hold while looking for more economical office solutions. But Mast claims that there is still a demand for high quality printing technology. "I think we saw a significant impact from the economic recession on pretty much every part of the printer business - the whole space - from inkjets all the way up to the high end boxes," he says. "We did see that our toner sales actually held up fairly well over the course of this year, which to me serves as an indication that customers are still out there printing, they are just trying to extend the life of their existing products as long as they possibly can."

That's probably just as well, since the company has pushed the performance boundary with the world's fastest A4-size colour laser printer, the 5130cnd, which can process up to 47 pages per minute. It's aimed at medium to large size businesses with heavy printing needs and, Mast says its cost of ownership should appeal. "We put duplexers on the vast majority of our product line up, and we offer it as standard on everything in our mid and high-range products."

Despite the demand for high performance, multifunction printers and advanced features are still wanted, says Mast: "We did not see a move away from colour or a move away from MFPs [multifunction printers] last year, so we did not see any effect of customers saying ‘OK I no longer want colour - I'm just going to stick with the cheapest black-and-white box that I can.'"

Demand for these features is, in part, kept up by the fact that these printers are smart enough to keep the costs under control, he adds: "When you buy a box we provide tools for our customer that allow them to have a colour box deployed in their network, but only allow certain users to print in colour on it. You can still get a colour box - for a very competitive price - but if you only want a couple of users to be able to print in colour you can lock the other users just to print in mono."

Biography

Steven Mast manages the Global Imaging Product Management team for Dell's Consumer and SMB segments. Mast has been at Dell for 12 years concentrating on product and programme management. Prior to Dell, Mast was a Senior Manager with Deloitte Consulting's Supply Chain Management practice and holds an MBA from Duke University and a BSCE from the University of Texas at Austin.