The Print industry witnessed stark realities of digital turmoil in the years 2018 and 19. While HP goes-on sustaining its leads in an increasingly competitive market, the conventional copier companies such as Konica Minolta, and Xerox are pursuing different approaches to secure and retain pertinence.
Every brand is geared up to maintain its competitive edge in the market.
- Konica Minolta is counting on its Workplace Hub pro platform to expand its IT services reach in the Small to medium-size business market.
- Ricoh is retaining an emphasis on a broad range of print, office and IT services
- Xerox is steering its connected Multi-Functional Printer business (under the thick cloud of recent merger troubles).
The brands in the copier industry must continue to embrace the following trends that will establish hit or a miss in 2020.
The Past Face of IoT Facade Will Fuel the Print Security Investments
The IoT-type security threats on printers will evolve as common attack vectors for cyber crimes exploiting IoT appliances with no sign of abating. The protection of today’s print environment is a challenging job because of its intricate nature specifically with a mixed fleet consisting of outdated and new devices. The General Data Protection Regulations have steered a few improvements in print security, yet there exists some lack of awareness of the potential IoT security threats around printing devices.
Attackers are not only pursuing the private & confidential information that gets stored on print devices but also to wield them as n/w access points in a similar fashion way as other IoT-type devices are being exploited. The security of printers becomes paramount with more of them being maintained and managed through the cloud. The copier manufacturers are expected to widen their security assessment and monitoring actions, along with collaborating with traditional IT security vendors, especially targeting threat intelligence.
Continued Print and Digital Conjunction
Print and digital conjunction will steer spiked demand for integrated document workflow in 2020. Even with the fast-paced adoption of digital and mobile technologies, many companies continue to rely on print to some degree. Research indicates that sixty-four percent of companies speculate that printing will remain essential to their daily chores even by 2025. A viable reason for that is a persistent need for a physical signature on different business documents. This furnishes a significant opportunity for Multi-Functional Print providers to enunciate a favorable proposal around the combined paper and digital workflow services.
With the ConnectKey platform, Xerox has already taken the lead. And if the copier manufacturers can steer engagement with its channel to create applications that help connect the paper to the digital crest, it will help businesses/companies make promising use of current Smart MFP investments.
Age of Cloud MFPs
Cloud-delivered Multi-Functional Printers will become more dominant, lowering the obligations associated with print management. The task of on-premise print management is expensive. Thus, making a shift from on-premise to the cloud enables submitting print jobs to a virtual print server, rather than multiple on-premise servers. Several bigfoots have made advances in the direction such as Lexmark and Xerox.
Continued digital transformation will be the major aspiration of the print industry.