It’s a part of a new division at the company, one called Staples Technology Services, that recently announced a major new business-to-business initiative.

In addition to maintaining and managing PCs, servers and networks, the new division is in the business of managing companies’ printing infrastructure: “printing solutions, including comprehensive printer fleet management that maximizes an organization’s assets and saves money.”

The interesting issue is whether Staples will get into the management of copier/MFPs as well as desktop printers. There was a time when copiers weren’t part of the overall IT setup, but those days are long past. If Staples is offering a soup-to-nuts approach to IT and print management, that means integrating copier/MFPs, printer/MFPs and single-function printers. And that means that copier dealers have yet another thing to worry about.

There’s not much chance that Staples will start servicing Canon or Xerox copiers. But there are two likely consequences — replacing at least some of their clients’ copier fleets with high-end printer multifunctionals, a direction the industry is already going in. Second, there’s the possibility of Staples partnering with either a national copier vendor or with local dealers. In either case, it would be likely to be Staples calling the shots on pricing, contract terms and proportion of dealer-channel equipment and retail market machines.

The Staples announcement confirms several trends already in evidence. The concept of offering comprehensive IT and document imaging services is the direction that companies like HP, Dell and Xerox have escalated in recent years. In the more narrow copier-printer area, managed print services is the hottest trend, and vendors and dealers are scrambling to find and train people who can manage and service such contracts. The concept of selling isolated boxes gets more and more irrelevant, while integrated, managed services with reduced overall costs is becoming the industry norm. Staples has the name, the geographic coverage and the bargaining power to become a serious contender.

Managed print services involves the service company taking over the placement, management and support for all output devices in a company, in return for a fixed cost, up to 30% lower than the company is currently paying.

Savings are achieved by concentrating devices, getting rid of old machines with high cost of operation, and encouraging best practices (such as two-sided output, scan-to-email and appropriate use of color).

The Wall Street Journal reports a major increase in the popularity of such services. The article cites numbers from Photizo Group, a Lexington, Ky., market research firm, which calculates that the print outsourcing business reached $20 billion last year, up 37% from the year before. That’s in a year when total shipments of printers and copiers only reached $4.8 billion, down 77% from the previous year.

The WSJ article cites one big example: Procter & Gamble. “Xerox is replacing some 45,000 devices, mostly H-P desktop printers, with about 10,000 shared multifunction devices that are mostly made by Xerox.” But it’s not just global corporations: Small companies, government offices, schools and universities are all being pursued by managed print services sales people.

HP is the leader, according to Photizo, with 35% share. Xerox comes in second with 20%. Others, including Canon, Ricoh, and Lexmark are trailing, but working hard to catch-up.

The company recently announced the launch of a new division called Managed Enterprise Solutions, which will sell managed print services as well as imaging and workflow software.

The announcement marks the launch of an offensive by HP into the MPS market. And to make an even bigger push, the company’s offering a payback guarantee — if a customer doesn’t meet projected cost savings, HP will open its own pockets.

When a qualified customer signs up, HP will calculate estimated savings. In 12 months later, the company will conduct another assessment. If the cost goal hasn’t been met, HP will pay back the difference (as a credit on future invoices — no cash will change hands).

Managed print services are often thought of as an option for huge companies. But is it also a strategy that can help small or mid-size businesses?

We talked with Bill Melo at Toshiba America about Managed Print Services (MPS), an area where Toshiba has been active for five years and one that is growing steadily. With MPS, vendors or their dealers take over the client’s whole printing and copying infrastructure. That means allowing the client to treat printing and copying as a utility, which is supplied by the dealer, and paid for (much like electricity or water) on a usage basis at the end of each month. All the headaches (maintaining equipment, managing inventories, and integrating into corporate IT operations) are handled by the dealer/vendor.

What are the main reasons that a company would decide to use MPS?

Historically speaking, the basic advantages are in terms of the three factors: cost, control and convenience. Cost: We have seen that companies have regularly shown savings of 20-30% over their current costs of printing and copying. Control: Most companies for the first time have an accurate measure of how much they are spending on these activities. Convenience: The IT or the purchasing department is relieved from having to worry about supplies management, equipment malfunctions and complex billing issues. The convenience of a single monthly bill with a detailed accounting for both color and black-and-white usage allows most executives to understand and manage for the first time the costs of outputting office documents.

You said “historically.” Are there more recent trends?

We are now seeing two new aspects of Managed Print Services. More and more customers want us to help them with environmental concerns as part of a corporate green initiative. That can involve measuring and improving such areas as electricity use, paper waste, CO₂ generation and solid waste recycling. They want us to provide a measurable solution.

A second area is security. Most companies are getting better at protecting their servers and their internal network traffic. But they are just waking up to the idea that their printers and MFPs have hard disks and generate their own confidential network traffic. All new machines have a wealth of features for setting up security, but they are hard to set up and harder to coordinate into a company-wide plan. So companies come to us or our dealers to put together a security plan as part of the MPS.

I think most people think that MPS would be a no-brainer for a Fortune 1000 company, but that a company that makes $10 million or has 100 employees can’t afford it.

On the contrary, we think that the proportional savings might be even greater for smaller companies. The biggest impact on cash flow is that with MPS you pay for services actually used, rather than buying or leasing equipment and stockpiling supplies. In smaller companies, the IT and purchasing departments are even more hard pressed than in the largest ones. For example, one of our Florida dealers worked with a small company that had only two copier/MFPs and five printers. Using MPS, they were able to realize hard savings of 20-30% by bringing some order to the consumables and service issues.

One fear I would imagine most potential customers would have is that you would tear out all the older equipment, including paid-off printers and MFPs, just so you could move more Toshiba equipment.

While we are glad to install Toshiba equipment when needed, we typically will maintain as much as possible the existing equipment that works. One of our first jobs is to do an audit of the current configuration. We try to make best use of what you have, and we replace machines only where there is newer and more cost-effective technology. Most of our sites, for example, have printers and MFPs from HP or Lexmark. We will maintain and deliver supplies for the equipment you have if that makes the most sense for the customer.

Isn’t it something new for you and your dealers — instead of pushing more boxes, you’re selling a service? How are you adjusting?

Actually, it wasn’t hard for the dealers — in general, they see themselves as selling services already. It was harder at corporate — we needed a mindset shift. What we have come to realize is that hiring a company to manage print services is much like hiring a company to renovate your kitchen. In the end, the customer wants to get quoted a single price, not having to worry about the cost of paint or tiles. Our challenge is to provide services that match and surpass what customers had before and, at the same time, improve our costs of doing business to increase profitability. It’s a different revenue model for Toshiba, but we see that it’s the wave of the future.

Bill Melo is Vice President of Marketing & Enterprise Services and Solutions at Toshiba America Business Solutions, Inc. (TABS). Bill oversees product and services marketing including the development and delivery of Toshiba’s Encompass Document Management and Output Assessment and Managed Print programs.