The Future of Managed Print Blog

Lyra - Part II

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News & Notes.  Here were a few more sounds bites that I found interesting from the Lyra Symposium....

1. Intel purchases more ‘green' power than any other company in North America.  LaserNetworks is proudly ‘green powered' through Bullfrog Power & it's great to see so many companies paying attention to the environment.  Congratulations to Brendan Peters & the guys at Intel.
2. Second note on Intel...they have MIB technology that could substantially improve the ease & amount of information on a device.  Cheers to Canon for picking it up...unfortunately, most of the other manufacturers are dragging their collective heals suggesting their IP is too important.  Sounds a bit like Apple-MSFT, until MSFT began to open things up!  Hopefully we don't need to wait another 20 years to pass these benefits on to our customers.
3. The Managed Print Services Association was established late last year & already has more than 500 members.  Congrats to Jim Fitzpatrick who is leading the charge & doing a great job.  It's an honour to be a board member representing the Dealer Channel.
4. Remanufactured toner for colour printers/MFPs increased at a rate of 35% in 2009 vs. 2008.  Three drivers were cited for this growth: price increases from the OEM companies; toner/product constraints; improved technology/reliability of the remanufactured product.
5. There are many ‘shades of green' when it comes to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) around the environment.  Many of the larger companies are tracking their results, even when they're not perfect (congrats to HP on this one).  Very disappointed that Ricoh published their CSR report...some confusing charts but not a single word about the environment.  Wonder if there's a correlation between their lack of environmental awareness & their huge revenue drop in 2009?  Excluding Ikon, Ricoh's revenue declines over the past four quarters have been: down 25%, down 30%, down 24%, down 26%.
6. In 2009, the biggest companies in the print/copy space were HP @ $24billion (print only), Canon @ $23billion (excludes their Oce acquisition), Ricoh @ $17billion (includes Ikon), and Xerox @ $15billion.
7. ‘Danger Zone' companies according to Lyra include Kyocera Mita, Sharp, & Toshiba...small percentage of their company's revenue with declining share and minimal investment in printing/copying R&D.
8. Xerox acquisition of ACS is very different from HP's acquisition of EDS.  ACS is in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) where EDS was true IT Outsourcing.  ACS will represent approximately 30% of the combined revenue with almost 60% of the total employees.
9. Memjet will arrive one day...a very exciting product that could truly impact productivity in the office.  This deserves its own blog!
10. Lexmark have some great new products & were recently awarded Buyer's Lab Mono MFP Line of The Year.  Unfortunately for them, the timing of the global recession & the slowdown in hardware purchases has limited any significant marketshare growth for the company.