Hewlett-Packard sees big opportunities in sectors such as retail and government for its managed print services (MPS) business. MPS is used by large IT enterprises to reduce costs.
“Sectors like retail, financial services, BPO and IT will drive MPS,” Mr Pierre Mirlesse, Vice-President - Managed Enterprise Solutions, HP Asia Pacific, told Business Line .
Another sector that could use MPS in India is the Government sector, said Mr Nitin Hiranandini, Director - Managed Enterprises Solutions, HP India.
“The government has a lot of dedicated printers connected to individual PCs. Once they transition to the network, MPS becomes viable.”
In order to showcase MPS, HP opened its Experience Centre in Bangalore to highlight some of the capabilities of its printers, including the ability to print from smartphones. Security of confidential documents is also important in an enterprise set up and HP demonstrated how a print job would not be fired to the printer until the person who had executed the print command came and swiped his identity card at the printer and authenticated himself.
The company also launched two printers for enterprises, the HP LaserJet Enterprise M4555 MFP series and the HP OfficeJet Pro 8000 Enterprise printer.
Discussing changing trends in recent times, Mr Mirlesse said that in 2010, people were concentrating on cutting costs, but right now they were interested in improving growth. “MPS can help organisations reduce costs and improve growth,” he said.
Discussing the advantages of MPS, Mr Anil Shankar, Customer Care Associate and Senior General Manager - Solutions and Technology, Shoppers Stop Ltd, said, “MPS helps us to lower internal management overheads. It also helps us with maintaining printer uptimes.'
At a presentation while announcing the launch of the Experience Centre, Mr Mirlesse said that MPS in India was growing faster than in Australia. He said that worldwide, HP managed 20 billion pages annually and had over 3,000 clients, including Unilever, SAP, 3M and LG Electronics.