HP's top MPS executive discusses today's drivers and stumbling blocks for services contracts.

Chris Casinella is a printing industry veteran who became Hewlett-Packard’s vice president of managed print services early in 2007. In the intervening year, he’s presided over a reorganization that created six practice areas in his department that touch on key aspects of managed print services, ranging from assessment and asset-management services to supplies procurement.

Although much of Casinella’s focus is directed to HP’s enterprise accounts, the sales best practices and market intelligence that are emerging offer insights for solution providers working to expand managed-services offerings to their customers.

Q: As you talk to potential customers about managed print services, do you find they understand the potential benefits, or are you still in an evangelization stage?

A: Our customers are looking for managed print services now. They want to better manage their fleets and buy printing resources in a different way — by paying for a service versus paying for assets and toner cartridges. I believe that in the maturity curve of managed print services, customers are more aware than ever, especially the enterprise customers. They look for cost savings as the Number One requirement we can provide them in a managed print services offering.

Q: Is there an industrywide rule of thumb as to the cost savings companies typically see with managed print services?

A: When I started in this area in 2000 there were many standards that we used. We felt that between 1 percent and 3 percent of a customer’s total revenue could be related to output, and somewhere around 20 percent of that could be related to the output associated with the office — not commercial printing, but output for the office. We always felt that managed print services could deliver savings somewhere in the 20 percent to 40 percent range for office printing.

Q: When you talk to companies that haven’t gone the MPS route already, what are some of the big stumbling blocks or concerns they have before they actually pull the trigger?

A: One big stumbling block is they don’t understand their printing environment because they haven’t been able to manage it. They don’t know what they have, and so when they go to the marketplace, they don’t know what to ask for. They can’t tell us, “We have X number of printers, and each of those printers prints X number of pages. So our total page volume is Y.” Our ability to analyze the customer’s environment with our assessment practice and with our consultants provides the customer with the value of being able to determine its current state.

Then, once the customers know their current state, we can build a business proposal that really addresses their needs. If cost savings is their key motivation, we can build a business plan and a future strategy that addresses that. Or, maybe the solution should focus on workflow, because the customer has business processes that are very paper intensive and they’re costing too much in money and human capital.

Q: What are you doing to help channel partners expand their managed print services practices?

A: We hope to enable our partners in the channel by giving them another level of information [about customers] based on our ability to gather data about customer usage patterns. We can offer customer intelligence based on our linkage with customers through our network tools.

Q: So, in addition to giving partners data about usage volumes, is there wider intelligence available to help them sell to their accounts?

A: Very much so. We hope to move to a place where we can provide our partners — especially our channel partners — with value-added services around managed print services that will enable them to build on their relationships. We can certainly help them understand their customers’ usage patterns. We can help them understand the health of the fleet from a hardware perspective. And we hope to be able to leverage that information to enhance our partners’ offerings to their users.