‘Portable and cloud printing are set for huge growth’ – Brother

Phil Jones, Managing Director at Brother UK, discusses the two important trends that he believes will positively impact the printer market – printing on the move, and the rise of services and solutions over hardware…

The rise in digitisation, collaboration and mobile working is creating huge sales opportunities for the channel.

It’s now a business necessity that employees are able to work as productively on the road as they do in the office – regardless of industry sector, and business leaders are looking for the right products, technology and partners to support this.

This creates a huge opportunity in the device peripheral market, particularly in some key vertical sectors, giving resellers a great way in to sell more to customers.

People still want to print but the ways in which people are printing are changing, with portable and cloud printing set for huge growth over the next few years. The most important factor in the speed of this growth is end-user education, as most smartphone owners still perceive printing easily from their mobile device when on the move as a pain point.

The drive to services including consultancy, project management and reporting will continue with recurring and repeatable business models more favoured over transactional models.

Vendors in particular will drive the agenda and focus time, effort and resources on channel partners who want to expand their capability in this area. This is about skills, ambition and consultancy selling.

Almost everything will be assumed to be able to be purchased ‘as a service’ – which creates a lot of opportunity for existing transactionally-led product portfolios and for rethinking business models.

At Brother, we spend a lot of time listening to resellers and end users to understand strategic priorities, areas of focus and unmet pain points in order that conversation remains relevant relating to our product portfolio. We like to be challenged with environments which may need modification or adjustment in software or hardware to work and value time.

As a result, we are able to offer work alongside our partners to offer print solutions which can be ‘boilerplate’ front-end critical applications to a retail print environment or an optimised balanced deployment in a corporate HQ.

Outside of our traditional print portfolio of products, we also supply a comprehensive package of resources to

support projects around collaboration (web conferencing), digitisation (broad range of scanning devices) and printing on the move (field force automation).