Printing & Imaging Blog

The “new” threat is actually a familiar face—copier dealers. For years they’ve been building profitable businesses selling copier leases and cost-per-page contracts, and now, an obvious way to expand their businesses is to embrace printers with managed services contracts. In fact, some of the more progressive dealers are building services around other pieces of the IT infrastructure, as well, such as networking and telecommunications.

Copier dealers and printing VARs used to coexist relatively peacefully, but today the dealers “are becoming a huge threat to [printing] VARs,” warns business consultant Steven Power, president of Sales and Marketing Solutions International. “Now a lot of the traditional copier channel is starting to say, ‘Hey, we can do managed services in IT.’”

And what’s their target market? “It’s in small and medium businesses where the dealers are offering extensive managed services in IT,” he adds.

Which puts pressure on printing solution providers. As they try to move beyond lower-margin transactional sales for hardware, market forces are coalescing to build tough competition for solution providers that don’t grab a foothold quickly. “This is why it’s so critical that VARs get into managed print services--everybody is out for that footprint right now,” Power says.