Welcoming print back into IT

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With the day of stand-alone printers, copiers and other output devices receding into the past, there is a growing trend for the IT department to find itself managing more output peripherals than ever before.

Already burdened by budget cuts and staff shortages, the average IT department has enough on its plate without adding more complications, but it’s increasingly likely that IT helpdesk staff will find themselves dealing with problems such as paper jams, toner shortages, spilled ink and other printing-related mishaps.

These used to be the problem of the facilities or procurement departments but not anymore and the reason is the multi function device (MFD). Print technology has become cheaper, faster and smaller, allowing hardware manufacturers to squash more functionality into the average output device.

These MFDs are fast replacing standalone fax machines, photocopiers and computer printers, freeing up desk space and costing less to run in the process.

“Output can be organised into a number of different categories – you can print, you can photocopy, you can fax,” said Gary Tierney, imaging and print group manager for HP Ireland.

“The last two were historically handled by procurement or facilities – fax machines and copiers were not handled by IT. However print has always been the responsibility of IT because print capable devices by definition have to interact with the network, and with the applications used by the organisation.”

According to Tierney, as the technology has evolved, copiers and other devices are increasingly becoming more involved with IT.

“Budgets are set in different parts of the organisation, with facilities owning their piece and working to their own deliverables. That includes everything from water coolers to coffee machines to desks and chairs, and along the way photocopiers and fax machines got lumbered in there,” he said. “However today, copying, faxing and scanning are functions rather than technologies in their own right.”

The advent of e-mail, the Web and the so called paperless workplace has created a challenge for hardware companies that previously made copiers, scanners and fax machines – how to replace lost revenue. The solution has been with the MFD.

“The conventional copier is as dead as a doornail, they’re mostly not even made any more,” said Jerry Carey, group managing director of Irish Business Systems (IBS). “All modern devices are essentially MFDs – they have taken the market. They’re now available in all specifications, in all sizes of output and from all price points. You can get an A4 model MFD at entry level prices, or a top of the range high spec model that will pump out 100 pages in a minute and everything in between.”

The biggest difference between these devices and the technology that preceded them is not just that they perform two or three functions instead of one, but rather that they have become integrated into the network. As the technology has evolved, the average print device has started to look less like an office utility and more and more like a piece of computing technology. Enter the IT department.

“If you leave that kind of hardware in the charge of the facilities managers, they’ll probably focus on the copying capabilities more than anything else, and you may not get the most out of your devices,” said Helen Berentzen, senior product manager at Ricoh. “Most modern MFDs are as sophisticated as full computers, and should be managed by the IT department, by IT people with IT skills, technical knowledge, networking understanding and an appreciation of security issues.”

“You can get so much more out of them if you add some IT capability to the way they are managed. There is a new tide now, with issues around security being so prominent and also with environmental issues rearing their heads. There is now more focus on reducing print costs as all parts of the company have had to justify their outgoings – people think twice now before printing.”

Meanwhile, the growth in availability and popularity of MFDs is helping companies in the print business to stave off the worst effects of the recession. “MFDs are one of the fastest growing parts of our market,” said Martin Deignan, director of sales and marketing for Oki.

“You can get models that are printer-centric and models that are more copier-centric. It’s a big area – we talk to customers about this every day in some way or another. People from traditional print backgrounds, such as ourselves, are looking into the potential of the copier market, and vice versa. In the process prices have come down a lot, management software has become much more versatile and the overall proposition has become much more cost effective.”

“In the past, it was usual for copiers to be part of a managed service contracted out to an external company, while print was handled by IT. In reality, both services are integrating as machines become more similar, coming under the wing of IT,” he added.

Berentzen suggests that while paper is definitely here to stay, it makes sense to minimise wastage and to improve efficiency by putting in place systems to digitise paper as it comes into the office.

“There are lots of times when hard copy is just ideal – if you’re sitting in a meeting reviewing a document, you want to be able to pass it around a meeting table, make notes in the margins and cross out paragraphs. There’s a role for paper, but converting to a document management system is really a good investment,” she said.

“For office environments, and there are a surprising number of them around, that still have bulging filing cabinets it’s possible to do this without spending huge amounts. Companies that already have MFDs in place can leverage the investment that has already been made and do much more with their hardware.”

Berentzen believes there are serious financial benefits to doing this.

“If you’re managing your document infrastructure effectively, you can save costs in lots of areas. For a start, you don’t have single function printers, copiers, scanners and fax machines – you’d have a single MFD. That saves you hardware costs, running costs and physical space in the office,” she said.

“If you use the scanning capability to feed documents into your system you can also start to save space by getting rid of the towering piles of paper that typically sit around modern offices.”

According to Berentzen, follow-me print functionality offers a further advantage to using MFDs plugged into the corporate network. This allows the IT department to assign a PIN to each user of the system that identifies them to the print server. Using that PIN each person can have the network output their print jobs from any printer on the network when they punch in their specific code.

This is popular with those companies that use it because the accountability that comes with it encourages users not to print unless they really need to, thus saving on costs. It can also be used to facilitate billing back to the client’s own customers.

“You can use modern print systems to manage your print more effectively because you can control what users do with output devices. We find for example that if we put in a ‘follow-you’ print system, the document isn’t automatically printed out but is stored on a server or an MFD until it’s released,” said Berentzen.

“When we do that, not only do you get user convenience and security but you also reduce waste. We found that in around 30% of cases, the documents sent to the printer are never actually released. That shows that people sometimes hit the print button when they don’t really need to, so that reduces waste quite a bit.”

A challenge for IT departments that find themselves charged with supporting networked MFDs is how to handle problems when they occur. Print is notoriously hard to support, and it’s estimated that up to 25% of all help desk calls originate in a problem with a printer.

“When you put MFD’s in, or connect a copier to the network, when a user tries to print and has a problem then they are going to bring that problem to the IT department’s helpdesk. Before, they got someone from facilities to show them how to unjam the machine, or they just went to the next machine that was working and used that – they didn’t go near IT. So this is something IT now has to budget for,” said Tierney of HP.

“There are also security issues – MFDs have hard disks inside, and when you scan, copy or print, an image of the document is stored on that disk. You have to be able to encrypt those images, make them secure and delete them on a regular basis. If you have a fax capability on the same machine, then you can also unwittingly have an intrusion point from a security point of view.”

Meanwhile, the advent of managed service contracts in the printing sector has also had a role to play. An increasing number of Irish companies are choosing to outsource the provision and service of their print needs to third parties, divesting themselves of the inconvenience of looking after a notoriously resource-hungry aspect of their IT.

“Small to medium-sized enterprises are probably the biggest growth market for this in recent times. There have always been corporates that have engaged in outsourced managed services but it’s becoming much more common at SME level as well,” said Deignan of Oki.

A major part of the appeal of the outsourced managed service is cost – pitched correctly against the needs of the company, even a small company can save on its print costs.

“Against the background of the recession, you have customers who are very conscious of cost. Normally a contractual arrangement with a managed service provider will be much more cost effective than going the traditional route of buying either printers or copiers,” he said.

According to Deignan, an outsourced managed service will save a company money for a variety of reasons.

“Cost savings are the big drivers here. The expertise and economies of scale a managed service provider can bring to bear on the cost of consumables and hardware are compelling, and you don’t need to have a huge number of printers for it to make sense,” he said.

“How many organisations have the internal capability to handle print? There are specific skillsets involved in it and people come and go. It can be a bit of a hassle. Outsourcing works out cheaper and that’s why it’s growing in popularity.”

As print moves back under the wing of the IT department, and print appliances have evolved into more fully featured network devices, the job of operating a managed service contract has become more complex. These contracts effectively call for the IT department to hand over responsibility for part of the network to a third party.

“It’s not as simple as plugging in your device, getting an IP address and away you go – I wish it was,” said Carey of Irish Business Systems.

“For example, we’re currently in the middle of installing a large managed services contract in Northern Ireland for that region’s Health Executive – their equivalent to our HSE. We’re rolling this out in four large hospitals, and to get that system required detailed planning and very complex software to make it all work. Their network uses four or five different operating systems, from Unix to Microsoft to old IBM legacy systems. That’s not a simple installation.”

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