Considering that HP is one of the clear Managed Print Services leaders, at first glance it can be amazingly hard to envy the vendor’s role in the MPS market because of its massive install base of easy-to-manage and often-consolidated printers.
In a best case scenario, HP or one of its channel partners wins an MPS account that mainly uses non-HP devices, leading to net new hardware placements and pages. However, in basically every other MPS win scenario, the client already has a fleet of HP printers and MFPs installed, so the win really consists of converting some legacy products to its latest models, supplying remaining HP printers with genuine toner, and eventually installing new HP systems as the legacy devices expire or as the client’s needs change. With that in mind, and given HP’s install base before the MPS phenomenon hit, it’s hard not to view HP as having the most to lose from MPS and the least to gain.
In a conversation last year, one of HP’s copier vendor competitors put it this way: “HP may be the MPS market leader, but their problem is they had to eat their own young to get there and will have to continue to do so to keep their share.” Ouch…
However, HP surely views these zero-sum gains as a far better alternative to MPS deals won by competitors, which often begin with an overhaul of the client’s HP install base, followed by supplying remaining HP printers with non-OEM toner and a drawn-out cycle of replacing these legacy devices with MFPs from the competing provider’s brands until the conversion is complete.
This cycle has become so common in MPS that a number of A3 vendors have swallowed their pride and partnered with their natural enemies, the non-OEM toner suppliers, to ensure
http://www.gapintelligence.com...%80%99s-trojan-horse
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