Survey: Brace For Surge In Document Management Sales

Printer and imaging solution providers should brace for a surge in sales: Document management solutions rank among the top five solutions midmarket IT buyers cited as spending priorities for the next 12 months, according to the VARBusiness Market Insight Report, which polled more than 600 midmarket and enterprise IT managers.

More specifically, one-third of midmarket IT decision makers say document management systems are high on their priorities list for the coming 12 months, the report found.

Midmarket survey respondents say document management--printers and scanners integrated with storage and archiving systems--are an essential component to three other major goals: streamlining business processes (66 percent), backup and disaster recovery (45 percent), and regulatory compliance (33 percent).

On the enterprise side, where these solutions have been around for a while, IT buyers ranked document management solutions much lower on their hit lists.

But the availability of document management solutions designed and priced for SMBs, coupled with declining hardware costs, have contributed to an increased demand among midsize companies, which, like larger firms, want to find better ways to drive efficiencies through increased automation and comply with government regulations around document archival and retrieval.

Printing and imaging vendors say solution providers can tap this demand to drive up sales of multifunction printers, scanners and related hardware, software and services. Most of the major printing vendors are now developing MFPs and scanners with document management in mind by providing hooks into common applications and back-end repositories and providing the ability to customize features, such as a graphical user interface, for a specific business process.

"We're focused on having very clean connections into our products, so you don't have to train an end user on a 10-step process to get a document in," says Laura Blackmer, vice president of U.S. channels for Hewlett-Packard's Imaging and Printing Group.

NEXT: VARs that are finding success selling document management solutions.