HP's Pursues $120 Billion Global Enterprise Printing Market

Hewlett-Packard Co. wants to sell more printers and managed print services to enterprise accounts, fueling its strategy with a new global business unit, special distributor agreements, targeted services, closer ties with printer-maker Canon and a line of channel-only printing devices.

HP’s new moves offer structure, assistance and incentives to channel partners and service providers interested in selling managed print services to enterprise accounts and small- to medium-sized businesses.

HP has inaugurated a new global business unit, called Managed Enterprise Solutions, headed by Bruce Dahlgren, an HP senior vice president, who will manage a staff of nine tasked with handling the vendor’s managed print services operations. The unit is part of HP’s Imaging and Printing Group (IPG).

The vendor also said that it has strengthened its long association with Canon, noticeably widening its portfolio of multi-function devices by combining Canon’s multi-function office systems with HP’s LaserJet and multi-function printers.

In addition, HP has aligned with four distributors—Synnex, Supplies Network, NER Data and United Stationers—calling them “Collaborative Infrastructure Partners,” offering each a different HP managed print solution and charging them with jointly delivering managed print services with channel partners.

Synnex has exclusive access to PrintSolv, Supplies Network to Carbon Six, NER Data to Print4.HP and United Stationers to HQueue. Each Collaborative member will receive training and dedicated support.

The vendor also unveiled three new products with corresponding supplies and services, available only through closed distribution to channel partners—the HP LaserJet 9059 MFP, the HP LaserJet M4349x MFP and the HP Color LaserJet CM6049f MFP.

The new products are offered only to HP PartnerOne Office Printing Solutions Elite partners and must be sold under contracts of at least three years. They are available in North America now with availability extending to other geographies later this year.

Separately, the vendor announced that it has renamed EDS, which it acquired last year, now calling it HP Enterprise Services, an outward expression of HP’s progress in fusing the offerings of the business services giant with its own.

Single partner strategy

Mark Hurd, HP chief executive, at an event dedicated to the vendor’s IPG initiative, stressed the high priority the company is placing on the enterprise print market, calling it “strategic, big and meaningful” and emphasizing the roles that both the former EDS and Canon play in its plans.

“We took the best of HP, added enormous capability with EDS, added the best of what our partnership with Canon can bring us, to give our customers more choice,” Hurd said. He further quantified his characterization of the extensive market opportunity HP sees in enterprise printing, pegging it at about $120 billion globally.

Company officials detailed the vendor’s idea to operate as a one-stop shop, or “single partner,” to enterprise print customers--providing hardware, supplies, software and services fulfilled either directly to its top clients or by channel partners to small- and medium-sized businesses and non-named accounts.

“The strategy is to optimize infrastructure, manage the environment and improve workflow for customers,” said Vyomesh Joshi, HP IPG executive vice president.

“We want to help customers save on costs, improve productivity, get the right business outcome and streamline operations,” he said. “It’s clear that customers are asking, ‘Who can help us?’ We believe that a single partner, a single point of integration, is the best way to help customers.”

Joshi said that HP set up the dedicated business unit “because the managed services opportunity is different from hardware and supplies. We are building out a managed print services practice with training, tools and processes.”

He pegged the managed print services market at about $19 billion globally, or approximately 15 percent of the segment’s overall size.

In constructing IPG’s sales model for the overall printing market, HP reserved for its direct sales team the top 4,300 enterprise accounts and the public sector, which Joshi estimated as worth about $76 billion together.

He said that the channel opportunity is comprised about 18,000 enterprise accounts worth $45 billion, and the small- to medium-sized business segment worth another $90 billion.