HP Defrays Printing Costs

The company&'s largely non-hardware announcement comes amid surging interest by printer vendors in engaging the channel to provide document, page and workflow consulting services to the market.

“We can take up to 30 percent of the cost of printing out of a customer&'s environment,” said Tom Codd, HP&'s director of Enterprise Imaging and Printing.

He cited one instance where Laser&'s Resource, a Grand Rapids Mich.-based HP partner and solution provider, used the new Total Print Management tools in an engagement with Grand Rapids Community College to reduce its number of print devices by 30 percent and its costs by 18 percent.

Tom Senecal, president of Laser&'s Resource, said the HP service and assessment offerings have allowed him to “remold my business.”

The focus on assessment and consulting has dovetailed with the growth of HP&'s multifunction peripheral (MFP) business, he said, as device consolidation has proven to reduce infrastructure costs.

The document consulting space has become heated in recent months, with new consulting tools and offerings from vendors such as Xerox and Lexmark and with rivals such as Oki Data boasting significant growth in their own channel-based consulting services.

More than half of the 1,600 solution providers who have qualified to offer HP&'s print management solution are U.S.-based companies.

HP, Palo Alto, Calif., said it will operate its assessment and consulting offerings under its new rules of engagement, where the vendor will work directly with a named-account list, with the channel providing fulfillment and with solution providers engaging the rest of the market.

The company unveiled its Universal Print Driver for Windows. Codd said the technology provides the ability to roll out one print driver for an entire enterprise to manage an entire printer fleet.

The driver can manage printer systems with HP PCL 5 and PostScript general color and monochrome laser printers manufactured since 1997.

In addition, HP said the upgrade to its Web Jetadmin tool, version 8.0, comes with new functionality such as including color control management, a Report Generation Plug-in 3.0 for user and application level reporting and asset utilization analysis.