Are You Still Trying to Sell Hardware?
Tonight we discuss “the renaissance of capture.” In a recent article in ImageSource titled Top 10 Industry Trends, authored by John Mancini, the President of AIIM, outlines what he believes to be the top 10 drivers within the DMS space… Let’s continue our discussion with the number 5 influencer in the DMS space this year:
5. The renaissance of capture. As the market expands into mid-sized organizations, there is untold untapped opportunity in organizations still reliant on paper processes. The expanding use of multi-function devices as access points to document systems creates all sorts of opportunities for solution providers. But solution providers need to get out of the mindset that this is still a hardware business or a hardware sale. It ain’t.
Indeed their is a renaissance afoot. However, it is not just within the small realm of capturing documents. Paper-based documents are still a very cost-effective way to transport information from one place to another. The printed page is increasing at an estimated 11% per year with 2006 volumes at somewhere close to 3500 billion pages (courtesy of Gartner via Jim Salzer over at DocuAudit International). However, I have seen no supporting data to further determine if these are simply reproductions of documents already available online or original documents to process and capture (although I have my suspicions).
DMS was originally intended to help structure the mess of file rooms, desktop clutter, and bloated file servers where otherwise structured data might be used (e.g. databases). A logical person might think DMS would be a strong contender to help structure the data with the rampant production of documents abound in today’s business. However, with increased potency of line of business (LOB) systems and the ever rising availability of digital originals, one can’t help wonder if the need for paper-based capture may be waning. On the flip side of the coin, dealers selling DMS are wondering whether providing a repository for the documents will allow people to let loose the purse strings and encourage generous volumes of reprints.
No doubt there are companies with rampant paper processes, and every dealer is anxious to know whether the pain is enough for them to buy one of their solutions, whereas business owners who have not adopted a DMS are asking why they would buy something when they don’t see a problem…
If the dealer is attempting to position a piece of hardware as the solution rather than taking into account a customer’s need for an over-arching strategy, I disagree with the opinion that the expanding use of multi-function devices as access points provides an opportunity to the dealer. However, I do see that DMS will provide an opportunity for dealers to reap the rewards of tying their hardware to a compay’s DMS or LOB system using middleware packages.
My only caution would be that dealers don’t become tunnel visioned in the process. John is clear to state “it ain’t” a typical hardware sale. True enough… so why even go in talking about the hardware at all?
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ChangeForge... a catalyst to affect the paradigm by Ken Stewart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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April 4, 2008 at 12:38 am
[...] to Gartner (see my article: ‘Are you still trying to sell hardware?’), printing volumes are on the rise while copying ...