By WILLIAM M. BULKELEY

With sales of printers and copiers slumping and businesses looking for new ways to save money, Xerox Corp. and its rivals are changing their sales pitch.

For decades, Xerox and others built their businesses by pushing companies to buy more office machines and supplying pricey ink and toner. But increasingly these vendors are now advising big customers to reduce their number of machines and find ways to cut printing costs.

"That sounds like a strange way for a manufacturer to make money," concedes Stephen Cronin, president of Xerox's global-services business.

Xerox, Hewlett-Packard Co. and others say they are seeing strong demand for consulting services that show companies how to eliminate desktop printers and force workers to share multifunction devices that copy, print and fax. The vendors say such moves can reduce printing costs up to 30%.

Associated Press

Xerox's services business reached $3.5 billion in sales last year.

The printing companies want to entice clients to sign up for exclusive contracts, allowing them to replace machines made by rivals and thus provide all printing supplies. In some cases, clients let a single supplier manage the whole system for a monthly fee.

The business, known as managed-print services, is "all about controlling the fleet" of document-producing machines, says Ed Crowley, president of Photizo Group in Lexington, Ky., which tracks the print-consulting market. He estimates revenue from managed-print services will jump 36% this year to $15.7 billion. continue reading...

from Xerox

If you work in an office, chances are you don’t change the copier or printer cartridge because it’s too messy or you just don’t know how to do it. That’s according to a new Zogby survey, commissioned by Xerox, of more than 2,000 office workers across the U.S. aimed to better understand some of the reasons behind office printing habits.

Of those surveyed, more than 1,000 respondents said they have experienced a mess when changing a printer/copier toner cartridge.

The mess, plus a lack of knowledge on how to change a printer cartridge, is why more than 10 percent of respondents typically put off printing until someone else changes the toner cartridges. continue reading...

From BLI

December 30, 2008 - For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with limited resources, being able to store and then retrieve a needed document manually can be a time-consuming task that lowers productivity and ultimately costs money. Xerox’s DocuShare Express document management software can help automate the process. Based on the company’s popular DocuShare platform, the solution is tailored exclusively for the SMB market to help manage critical business documents easily and affordably.

For starters, Xerox stripped out the deployment complexity of its enterprise-class offering. DocuShare Express features an automated Quick Install Wizard to help business owners get up and running quickly, as opposed to the dozen or so configuration screens required to set up the solution properly. The company also made DocuShare Express more affordable: $1,800 for 10 full-access users plus 10 read-only seats, which is about half the cost of a comparable DocuShare deployment. continue reading...

By Craig Faczan

Many VARs neglect imaging supplies in their product portfolios, and for good reason: There is very little margin on printers and OEM cartridges. With high-quality aftermarket products, however, you can develop a good source of recurring profits.

According to market research firm InfoTrends, OEMs own 73 percent of the market in monochrome cartridges and 93 percent in color cartridges—statistics that are lost on many solution providers. Generally speaking, competing with aftermarket cartridges is a losing battle: The market is small, price-driven, and saturated with competition. Why compete with thousands of companies fighting for a small percentage of the business when you can strategically convert customers from high-priced OEM cartridges and reap the rewards?

In the life of a typical laser printer, 80 to 90 percent of its total cost of ownership (TCO) is from cartridges. A high-end network laser printer that outputs a million pages may cost $1,000. Over its life, the printer will probably use about $8,000 in cartridges and require about $1,000 worth of service. To compete with local providers, the Internet, and even the OEMs, you likely would need to sell at 10 percent margins to reap about $1,000 of profit over the life of the printer. Clearly, that is not a compelling business model. continue reading...