Australian managed print services set to boom

Asia Pacific’s MPS will explode as local revenue increases by 30% every year for the next five years.

According to Keng Keng Tan, senior analyst for the Photizo Group, the Australian MPS market will grow to $2.5 billion by 2015.

“This number is big, but it doesn’t just include the hardware or the consumables. It also includes the services and solutions that are related to document workflow management as well as business process optimisation.”

Tan spoke at this week’s the 2011 Asia Pacific MPS Conference to over 120 print professionals within the field. Hosted by the Photizo Group at the Intercontinental Hotel in Sydney, the two-day event encompassed educational sessions to management metrics. The conference focused on in-house non-production printing. Tan highlighted the growing threat of MPS to print-for-pay operators.

“In broad terms, you will see the commercial printers become wary of MPS and the change that is taking place in the market. They are beginning to provide some of these solutions on higher end production devices, and a couple of companies are well positioned with large format inkjet printers,” she says.

Pictured: Keng Keng Tan at the 2011 Asia Pacific MPS Conference in Sydney.

New multi-function and commercial production print engines are being released with e-print capability, so that they can link in networks. Australia services about 30% of the Asia Pacific MPS market.

“What we see here in the Asia Pacific region is OEM staff that are already well trained on the concept of MPS, and are beginning to train their channel partners. Solution providers from North America, Canada, Europe are all coming to Australasia. There is no language barrier or the need to supply double-byte character set (DBCS), which is a requirement for companies where Chinese is spoken,” she adds.