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In the last few years enterprises have focused more on the core business and outsourcing the non-core activities. While software goes into various versions, similarly hardware also goes through the 'next logical evolution' and makes an year old technology obsolete. Hence outsourcing peripheral devices brings in high degree of value to the enterprises. And with printers being a major component of IT peripherals is the biggest market for outsourcing. More so, enterprises are increasingly finding it difficult to manage the print devices. And realizing the market opportunity here vendors like Xerox and WeP offer a slew of print outsourcing services to the enterprises.

Today with hardware costs escalating, enterprises do not want to create fixed device assets that will become redundant as new technologies come to fore. When it comes to peripheral devices like printers, the issues involved in managing the devices are indeed time consuming. Quips Thomas S Anand, chief strategy officer, WeP Peripherals: "There are many times when the technology that one is using becomes obsolete. For instance, the current printer might get repositioned due to new technology or the user wants to reposition a printer that was until a couple of months ago perfectly fine. It is a CIO's nightmare to invest in a technology that is not useful a couple of months down the line." This is the core USP of outsourcing-'do not worry about obsolescence.'

In the print outsourcing paradigm the vendors provide, the popular option is the pay per use model. The users pay for the number of prints. The pricing structure is on a monthly basis. This is a big advantage from a cost perspective-one, the users print what is required and two, as every print job is billed, one gets the clear view on the expenses incurred on printing. Says Thomas: "We strongly believe that subscribing for printing services on a pay for use basis for all printing needs is the key to bringing down printing costs. It is with this philosophy that we pioneered the printing services for business printing in 2001." Today WeP has over 1000 organizations availing its outsourcing service in over 600 locations across the country.

'Almost every organization has resources deployed to manage printing infrastructure. Outsourcing functions like print brings to table defined benefits' -Thomas S Anand, chief strategy officer, WeP Peripherals

With good demand for print outsourcing, it is rumored that other leading vendors are also seriously exploring offerings outsourcing services that open up new revenue models for them apart from standalone printer sales. Apart from WeP, Xerox Global Services is also into print outsourcing. According to company sources, it provides equipment, manpower, software and other services. Customers can pay at the end of each month based on usage on pay-per-use basis.

Currently, print is the only area that has taken the outsourcing route in the IT peripherals space. But there is good potential for broad basing the services so that other peripheral devices like UPS can be outsourced. For instance, power management in large data center environments can be a complicated issue. In these scenarios a managed service provider makes more sense as the company can just own the computing hardware and not the peripheral devices. Outsourcing peripherals is just maturing and in time one might see the device portfolio expanding. The biggest value the enterprise will accrue out of peripheral outsourcing is that they would not need to worry about product obsolescence.

Shrikanth G
shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in

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