I heard from an excellent source today that all of the new color (not sure ifd that means just the 03 series) mfp's from Ricoh support a tiered cost per page billing. I am assuming that this is for all of the Ricoh 03 series systems.
The tiered billing would be in direct response to Kyocera and Xerox systems. I was also told that this was something that the direct channel would not use (yeah right), and @remote is going away. My source will be emailing me a support document in the next few days or so that can verify this.
Has anyone else heard of this?
My thoughts....having a tiered billing approach would help me win net new business especially if I am up against Xerox and Kyocera (if that dealer or direct will be presenting the Kyotier). I should be able to gain additional margins by taking business away from my competitors especially when the account is only printing a small amount of color on each page. I can also use the ricotier to protect existing accounts that are being hammered by Global/Xerox and or Kyocera.
The biggest question is if dealerships will embrace this technology and learn how to profit from it. Thus, it's just a matter of time before Konica Minolta, Sharp, Canon and Toshiba will adopt this model. I'll admit in my market place there is a heavy Global presence, and the Kyocera presence is minimal (I have not heard of that dealer enabling Kyotier), I think one of the issues would be how to automatically collect and compute the meter reads and then conduct the billing. I'm sure for some Kyocera dealers that are technically challenged that they may have stayed away on purpose from enabling tiered billing.
With Ricoh convergence next week, I'm sure this will be a topic of discussion. If there are any P4P'ers going to convergence it would be awesome if they could report more on this. I hope to have more info in a few days!
Art