This Month's Spectrum Summary:

(The following is an excerpt from the September 2007 issue of Spectrum, a proprietary monthly briefing published exclusively for the clients of I.T. Strategies, Inc. © 2007)

GraphExpo 2007: Conflicting Trends Muddy the Picture; Hardware No Longer the Key Frontier

This month we have Marco Boer, just back from a trip to GraphExpo in Chicago, to help us cut through the PR smog. Topping his big picture debriefing is how the Expo affirmed that document printing is far from dead. There was a lot of excitement among the users, but not much new technology in part because vendors are holding it back for drupa 2008.

The event highlighted some conflicting, but significant, trends. Continuing price-performance enhancements of products leads users to want to do more printing in-house because they are more able to afford it. But the greater sophistication of today's light production printers can outrun the know-how of the typical office user. So many find they still need to send a lot of their print jobs out. Also evident was the new trend toward more cross-selling among printer vendors such as Canon, Kodak, KonicaMinolta and others. This makes product differentiation more difficult. So vendors tend to respond by building more and more features into their printers adding to the complexity, which many users find to be a problem. It was evident that vendors need to work harder on user friendliness. Until then, many users, even those with extensive in-house resources, will continue to send out jobs to print-for-pay-shops.

Other trends driving change include higher labor costs, lower per page cost with the latest high-end hardware, and in the U.S., new postal regulations. Resulting changes include large users scaling up to higher-end digital presses to save labor costs, shorter product life cycles, and big changes in the commercial printing industry. The number of printing industry players will continue to shrink, with the industry expected to divide into two layers: a small number of giants at the top with new generations of analog presses, nothing in the middle, and a large number of small shops with mostly digital equipment.

Looking ahead, again there was not much in the way of new hardware, but the expectation that with fixed-array, high-end inkjet will be playing a growing role, even within major EP players like Xerox and Océ. A factor that is likely to be slowing growth in document printing volume is the expected move from hardcopy to electronic billing. This may curtail the growth that some predict for trans-promotional print volume.

But print volume isn't the sole driver for growth in our industry. Vendors will be evolving toward complete solutions beyond just hardware. Trends evident at GraphExpo are expected to allow more people to do more things to create more value.