Regular readers of this Blog know that we find certain truths to be self-evident. Among these are the following time-tested facts:
- Business documents are among an organization’s most critical knowledge assets.
- Failure to think strategically about output management leads to unnecessary cost, security threats, wasted resources, and decreased competitiveness.
- Without a holistic output management approach, the number of print servers, application-specific point solutions, heterogeneous printer fleets, etc. tend to grow in an uncontrolled manner, along with the associated costs and support burden.
- Proprietary, hardware-specific print products are a poor long-term solution. Scalable, standards-based, vendor-agnostic solutions offer greater real-world benefits.
- Comprehensive, cloud-based print and scan management solutions address most if not all of the aforementioned challenges while facilitating digital transformation initiatives.
As it turns out, we’re not alone. Global technology research firm Quocirca recently published their comprehensive Cloud Print Services Landscape report. The research, based on a survey of 500 IT decision makers, provides valuable insight into how large organizations are managing their critical application output today and the role cloud-based solutions will play in the future.
While some aspects of the report were unsurprising, I found certain details to be real eye-openers. For example, 69 percent of companies* surveyed were already using a cloud print management solution… with U.S.-based respondents reporting 81 percent adoption of cloud print management solutions. However, even with this enthusiastic adoption of cloud print services, only 13 percent of organizations surveyed said they planned to reduce the number of print servers in their networks.
What?
Underlining the seriousness of this situation was Quocirca’s finding that “…reliance on print servers can be costly and inefficient and expose an organisation to risk. Quocirca’s 2023 calculations of the costs of a print server show that each basic print server (no high availability or other additional functionality) costs over £3,000 per annum to operate, including costs of hardware, implementation, management, and energy.”
These numbers and opinions echo the real-world sentiments of LRS’ own customer base. In fact, some of the largest reductions in cost and print-related support effort come from the ability of LRS software to eliminate hundreds or even thousands of existing print servers in a customer’s environment. Just last year, a major pharmaceutical company found over $4 million in savings by migrating their existing print server-based output infrastructure to a simpler environment running in the cloud. Much or most of these savings resulted from the elimination of more than 130 print servers.
As SAP, Oracle, Epic, and other enterprise application suites move toward a cloud-based deployment model, it makes sense that the systems used to manage the secure capture and delivery of business-critical documents would follow suit. To learn what Quocirca said about LRS’ own cloud-based offerings, click here to download an LRS-focused excerpt from the larger report.
Regardless of whether you are considering, already using, or skeptical about cloud-based print and scan management in your organization, you can always contact LRS and discuss best practices gleaned from other large enterprises. The resources you save may be your own!
* Quocirca surveyed 500 organizations across the UK, France, Germany and the US across SMBs and large enterprises.