Magic Quadrant for Managed Print and Content Services

Savings opportunities for customers are increasing as the focus of MPS shifts from optimizing hardware to optimizing business processes. Print optimization leads can use this assessment to choose a provider that also offers consultation as the market transitions to managed content services.

Market Definition/Description

This document was revised on 10 November 2014. The document you are viewing is the corrected version. For more information, see the Corrections page on gartner.com.

"Managed print services" (MPS) is a generic Gartner term for a service offered by an external provider to optimize or manage a company's document output to meet certain objectives, such as driving down costs, improving efficiency and productivity, or reducing the IT support workload. Under MPS, a service provider takes primary responsibility for meeting the customer's office printing needs, including the printing equipment, the supplies, the service and the overall management of the printer fleet.

The main components provided are needs assessment; selective or general replacement of hardware (optimization); and the service, parts and supplies needed to operate the new and/or existing hardware. The provider also tracks how the printer fleet is being used, the problems and the user satisfaction. The MPS provider analyzes the information gathered in the course of tracking printer usage and makes (or recommends to the customer) the adjustments needed not only to ensure fleet efficiency, but also to meet changing user needs.

Gartner defines "managed content services" (MCS) as a comprehensive solution that rationalizes, streamlines and optimizes business communications by providing customers with consultative help, software and implementation. In the early stages of maturation, it is tightly coupled with MPS and focuses on communications inside the organization. As the eventual successor to MPS, MCS will subsume the print-related functions of MPS and also help customers manage the same content and documents in digital form.

MPS and MCS are mostly adopted by organizations with more than 500 users, across all industries and in all regions. Although MPS and MCS can benefit all but the smallest organizations, it is midsize and large organizations that account for most engagements. Large organizations, in particular, tend to have the most complex and least efficient office printing practices to begin with, and thus they stand to benefit the most from optimizing MPS and transitioning to MCS. These large organizations and many midsize ones, as well, typically have offices in multiple locations and world regions. Some seek MPS in all of their offices from Day 1, but most choose to start small and then add sites, divisions, countries and regions over time. For that reason, our Magic Quadrant is limited to providers that can serve as a single source for at least two world regions.

MPS usually covers scanning and document capture and may also be expanded to include staffed services, such as copy centers, as well as telecommuters. It can also be extended to include the restructuring of document workflows. Some MPS engagements are also designed to improve document security or to reduce print volumes and power consumption for environmental reasons.

This Magic Quadrant predominantly evaluates traditional MPS, but also takes into consideration the following elements of MCS:

• The IT side of printing — printer server and printer driver maintenance and consolidation; printing security services; business system integration; and mobile, thin-client, and virtual desktop printing administration services
• Business process automation
• Business process optimization
• Emerging MCS

Note that the market for MCS is not yet mature enough to warrant its own Magic Quadrant. Therefore, in this Magic Quadrant for Managed Print Services and Content Services, we are evaluating vendor capabilities in managing print and also in managing the emerging content service market. MCS accounts for approximately 20% of the weight.

To accompany this Magic Quadrant, Gartner will publish a Critical Capabilities document that will fully evaluate these MCS criteria.

MPS involves a consolidation of spending, but the actual payment schemes vary. Generally, the external service provider either owns the hardware or (more typically) leases it from a financing company in its customer's name. The customer usually pays a per-page charge, which covers the cost of the equipment, any leasing costs, the supplies, the parts, the service and other MPS elements.

Some contracts stipulate a minimum number of pages per device per month, with unused pages forfeited. Others involve some variation on the monthly minimum, such as a sliding cost per page that decreases as the number of pages increases. Services are usually folded into the click charge, although in some cases, they are billed on a flat monthly or quarterly basis. Contracts that impose no minimum number of pages appear risk-free but typically obtain some other financial commitment on the part of the customer, such as a flat fee, a per-device fee or a per-seat fee.

Some MPS contracts include guarantees of a certain result, but this hinges on agreeing to do things the vendor's way. For example, a customer might have to agree to consolidate from an average of five users per device to 15 or 20 users per device, which implies a longer maximum walking distance for users, and the elimination of personal printers even for employees who must not leave their work location because they are interacting with their customers face to face or by phone. MPS may also be extended to include outsourcing of desktops, servers and networks.

MCS is priced and billed as a mix of flat-fee services, software licenses and maintenance fees, one-time and hourly fees, and per-usage fees.

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Managed Print and Content Services

Source: Gartner (November 2014)

ARC was formed over many years through the acquisition of local reprographic service providers that specialize in meeting the document-related needs of architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) firms. These include the need for skilled and usually on-site staffing, rapid turnarounds, excellent image quality, wide-format prints, and accommodating the cyclical nature of proposal and project-driven niches, as well as managing and distributing digital documents. ARC is also one of the few large MPS and MCS providers that is neither an equipment manufacturer nor closely tied to a single manufacturer. ARC's current MCS offerings specialize in the AEC-industry-specific IT side of printing and business process automation.

Strengths

• ARC understands the fragmentation of workflow and discrete silos of information within the architectural, engineering and construction environment and has made improvements to create a more contiguous document management environment for its customers by connecting construction job sites and offices with collaboration services and devices to facilitate information exchange and organization. Its vast experience in providing wide-format prints remains a distinct competitive advantage.
• ARC's Abacus software continues to provide especially detailed cost tracking and clearly organized invoices that AEC customers need to manage and bill back their print-related costs across many customers and projects. Abacus is evolving beyond billing management, and ARC has deployed with some of its large customers a cloud content management extension to Abacus that is adapted to the especially diverse range of documents and drawings used in AEC, and it recently added print-time pop-ups to divert printed pages to digital archives.

Cautions

• ARC still has very few customers outside the AEC industries. In principle, many other sectors might benefit from the flexibility that ARC offers its AEC customers in setting up and taking down temporary sites. But in practice, the economics of other sectors would make this difficult, and neither ARC nor its local subsidiaries have shown a strong interest in them.
• AEC customers look closely at the resources and experience that ARC will apply to sites and projects outside North America and Europe. Although the company is active and opportunistically growing in other world regions, ARC's business volumes outside of these geographies are still small, and the track record is not as extensive.

Canon's MPS business is built on one of the largest sales and service organizations in the world for MFPs, and Canon's extensive A3-centric product line also underpins its MPS offering, which it calls Managed Document Services (MDS). Canon serves the gamut of industries, and most of its direct operations seek to help customers by optimizing and managing their printers and MFPs. Canon currently offers MCS across the IT side of printing, business process automation and optimization, and emerging MCS. Some of these leverage Canon's Therefore cloud-based content solution. Canon's MCS offerings tend to be more assessment, design and consultation than prepackaged spot solutions, but nevertheless cater to industries such as healthcare, finance, education, law and manufacturing.

Strengths

• Canon continues to staff up its Global Services program so that it can better serve multiregional customers, and the headquarters of this program are near New York, in London and in China, rather than centered on the Japanese headquarters. The business process consultants it is hiring globally will also benefit large, direct, multiregional customers and help Canon fully leverage the expertise of the former Oce Business Services Division.
• Canon allows customers to hand off complicated aspects of printing, as well as printer server and printer driver maintenance and consolidation. Canon's print IT management professional services includes needs assessment, strategy planning, design, and setup of the printers and MFPs. For customers that are willing to step back from Windows printing services, Canon can also configure its customers' printer servers, Unidrivers and SmartClient direct-over-IP-job routing.

Cautions

• Canon's capabilities can vary region by region and even within a single country, depending on which Canon entities are selling into and servicing the account (for example, Canon national accounts or dealers). Ensure that you understand which part of Canon you are working with, and push for uniformity of coverage across your office locations.
• Check that Canon will cover all your MPS goals in all your locations. For example, Canon has less MPS coverage in Latin America.

HP has won and retained large numbers of MPS customers of all sizes in all sectors and in all world regions. HP's service consists of a single global package, with different service sets and options that accommodate the needs of the customer and the location. Although HP provides MPS to all sectors, it recognizes that helping its customers optimize their document workflows and business processes requires an industry-specific focus, and it has taken that approach with the communications, media, entertainment, healthcare, manufacturing, financial services and insurance industries and with the public sector.

Since its own equipment is mostly of the A4 design, HP also collaborates with Canon and, more recently, with Sharp to provide and, in the case of Sharp, to service A3-style MFPs. For many of HP's largest customers, MPS is an extension of a relationship that also involves IT infrastructure outsourcing services or computer systems, storage or networking, and software. HP currently offers MCS across the IT side of printing, business process automation and optimization, and emerging MCS.

Strengths

• HP continues to improve upon its MPS and MCS offerings in order to reach a wider customer base. On the product side, it has added Sharp as an A3 partner, and it has also begun placing its own HP-manufactured pagewide-array MFPs, the Officejet Pro X and Officejet Pro Enterprise, into MPS accounts. On the fleet management side, HP strengthened its capabilities in managing multivendor fleets of legacy devices. HP also continues to lead the way in the field of integrating mobile printing as part of the overall print strategy.
• HP's printer security services are especially comprehensive. They include a mix of assessment and planning in the form of presales consulting for secure printing; postsales installation and configuration; implementation of recommendations in the form of the standard MPS deployment services; and end-of-contract data removal. HP also offers planning workshops, such as the HP Imaging and Printing Security Center (IPSC) consulting, and also the hands-on Security Advisory Services.

Cautions

• HP is willing to take on customers of all sizes, including global accounts, but its pricing is not always uniform globally. It also tends to both propose upfront and then advise over time a more A4-centric mix than you may need. Make your wishes known, because HP has added more A3 models.
• HP's MPS customers (which will go to HP Inc. after HP's planned split) will need clarification on which of HP's offspring companies will provide the ecosystem of content-related software and services (such as enterprise content management [ECM] and information governance) currently provided from the enterprise side of HP.

Known as Optimized Print Services (OPS) worldwide, Konica Minolta's service offering has been especially successful in Europe and is an increasingly important way for the company to distribute its mix of A3- and A4-style MFPs. The continued improvements that Konica Minolta has been making to its OPS service offerings combined with its MCS vision have pushed the vendor forward into the leadership quadrant this year. Konica Minolta currently offers MCS across the IT side of printing, business process automation and optimization, and emerging MCS.

Strengths

• Konica Minolta has made enhancements around its Professional Services, which support its OPS, and redesigned its OPS toolsets. In addition, it has created a formal service delivery organization in order to establish a complete alignment with customers' requirements and their desired business outcomes. It has also made improvement around aligning its service offerings through a program of vertical alignment, which includes training and assigning its sales representatives to named industry verticals.
• The project management offices and specialized engagement teams that Konica Minolta added to its regional operations can help customers that are ready for such a change to extend their optimization from printing to business processes. Konica Minolta provides customers a mix of prepackaged and consultative/development services, most of which have been in the field since 2013 or earlier.

Cautions

• Konica Minolta's global coverage is continually improving, but do check that it adequately covers the geographies in which you require services. It has increased coverage in Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa, Asia/Pacific, and the Gulf, but Latin America remains a weak spot.
• In some geographies, Konica Minolta's corporate focus on MCS has not filtered down to some sales and service personnel, who are not proactively pushing beyond OPS. Therefore, you may be required to drive the initiative from your end.

Kyocera Document Solutions is a major laser printer and MFP supplier and provider of other document solutions, and the company has long differentiated itself with its waste-reducing long-life imaging drums. Although North America is the largest market for MPS, Kyocera Document Solutions' MPS program is more firmly established in Western Europe. In both regions, it relies mostly on its established dealer network for service. Kyocera Document Solutions currently offers MCS across the IT side of printing, business process automation and optimization, and emerging MCS. An important part of Kyocera's strategy is to draw on KDDI, a global company that specializes in telecommunications and cloud hosting, and which, like Kyocera itself, was founded by Dr. Kazuo Inamori. Kyocera Document Solutions moved into the Visionaries quadrant from the Challengers quadrant. It understands MCS and the services that customers require.

Strengths

• Kyocera Document Solutions' strength in performing the initial needs assessment well and the dedication and flexibility shown in helping the customer rightsize and maintain its fleet make for a firm foundation on which to build an ongoing partnership.
• Kyocera Document Solutions is unique in that it extended its MPS to the cloud through standardization of infrastructure, virtualized server resources and automated processes. Its offerings include consolidating several physical print servers down to a single virtualized one hosted in a private cloud where all processing, management and policy enforcement is handled by Kyocera or its partner through a virtual private print network. With Kyocera's new cloud printing service, customers that are prepared to entirely outsource the responsibility for office and mobile printing can put all of the infrastructure and management in Kyocera's hands.

Cautions

• Billing administration, although on point, is sometimes reported by some customers as being periodically tardy.
• Enterprises should check carefully how Kyocera Document Solutions will meet their MPS and MCS requirements. The number of Kyocera Document Solutions' large MPS and MCS customers, although growing, is still modest. Kyocera Document Solutions relies partly on its dealers to fulfill large-scale engagements, but their expertise is usually with small or midsize customers.

Lexmark specializes in industries that do a lot of process-driven printing, such as retail, banking and securities, manufacturing and natural resources, insurance, public sector, and healthcare. Although there is a single Lexmark plan, it is adjusted and customized to the needs of the organization.

While Lexmark's recent and well-publicized acquisitions were in ECM and other digital document areas, Lexmark has also made, and continues to make, substantial investments in MPS software, practices, staffing and training. Lexmark usually advocates an optimization strategy that centers on equipment of an A4 design. Lexmark currently offers MCS across the IT side of printing, business process automation and optimization, and emerging MCS. Lexmark's MCS offerings include long-standing Lexmark services, as well as ones based on the software and cloud services that it inherited from Perceptive Software and the other companies it acquired. Lexmark's vertically aligned MPS program helps it develop and launch MCS within its target industries.

Strengths

• Lexmark's strengths lie in vertical services. It fields 18 solutions across its core verticals of banking, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and government, as well as insurance and transportation. Though some, such as the Logistics Document Management solution, work across many industries, most automate a major process in an industry, such as policy generation in insurance. Lexmark continues to add industry-specific solutions across a large number of vertical markets. In the latter half of 2013, it added healthcare company Pacsgear to its recent acquisitions.
• Lexmark continues to make major investments in its solutions platform (Lexmark Print Management) with the integration of mobile, print release, document accounting, serverless printing and other solutions on one platform for the customer.

Cautions

• Lexmark has a good worldwide reach, but customers that require a global contract comprising coverage beyond the mature markets, especially in the Middle East, should check if Lexmark is well-equipped to manage the accounts to the customer's specification.
• If you are outside of one of the industries that Lexmark typically covers, check closely to make sure there is a good fit.

Ricoh has very effectively mobilized its far-reaching worldwide sales and service organization — both to shift existing customers to MPS and to aggressively pursue new MPS accounts, some of which it has pulled away from competitors. Ricoh tends to draw on its own broad line of A3 MFPs in its MPS engagements.

Ricoh has a single service plan, with options and variations to suit the needs of different kinds of customers. Ricoh currently offers MCS across the IT side of printing, business process automation and optimization, and emerging MCS. In many cases, much of the value that Ricoh adds to the services themselves comes from the way it embeds them in a comprehensive needs assessment and solution development process that is anchored in its MPS program.

Strengths

• For the majority of global contracts, Ricoh does not rely on dealers and subcontractors to deliver on large MPS engagements; 95% of Ricoh's delivery staff for its largest accounts are Ricoh's own employees.
• Ricoh has made strides in expanding into different service areas and in gaining vertical expertise through acquisitions in recent years. For example, Ricoh acquired mindSHIFT, a provider of IT services for small and midsize businesses, in January 2014. Such acquisitions strengthen Ricoh as a candidate to manage print and content services across companies of varying sizes and in all verticals.

Cautions

• Customers sometimes report glitches across diverse areas, such as delivering global proposals, global pricing and global contract language, as well as managing the software, including pull printing and other functions.
• Some of Ricoh's own personnel and channel partners are not aware of the evolving nature of Ricoh's MPS and MCS offerings. The customer may need to push Ricoh to show the full extent of its capabilities and offerings.

The Toshiba Encompass brand includes MPS and needs assessments. Toshiba is also a major supplier of A3-style MFPs, and it usually places them in its MPS engagements. The company can provide MPS directly, but most of Toshiba's business is done through its extensive dealer network. Toshiba moved into the Visionaries quadrant from the Challengers quadrant. It understands MCS and the services that customers require. It will take Toshiba time to test, validate and execute on its vision as it relies on the indirect channel.

Strengths

• Toshiba's MPS customers generally report that it is responsive and attentive to their needs, and it's common for customers to remain loyal and stay with Toshiba over time. Many were originally customers for Toshiba's well-established line of MFPs.
• Toshiba poses intriguing synergies for managing digital signage and point of sale as an extension of MPS, especially in sectors such as retail, hospitality and education. Like printers, digital signage is easy to purchase and deploy but harder for most organizations to use efficiently and effectively on their own.

Cautions

• Toshiba's reliance on dealers for geographically dispersed accounts means that coverage is less than uniform, even within a single region or country. Customers sometimes complain about delays in receiving consumables and spare parts.
• Toshiba's MPS business is heavily concentrated in the U.S. Its market presence and track record elsewhere are much narrower, even in Western Europe, which is the second-largest market for MPS in the world. In recent months, Toshiba has been trying to grow its MPS in Eastern Europe. However, prospective buyers in regions outside of the U.S. should look closely at the MPS-specific experience of the Toshiba organizations in those regions.

Xerox's MPS practice dates to before 2000 and was the first large-scale program of its kind, upon which most of its competitors' MPS programs are to some degree modeled. The Xerox Next Generation MPS is the most comprehensive plan, followed by partner-delivered Xerox Partner Print Services plans. Xerox works hand-in-hand with Fuji Xerox, which is the dominant MPS provider in the Asia/Pacific region and one of the largest worldwide, to provide customers a consistent set of services cross-regionally or globally. Xerox has been one of the vendors leading the way in MCS, and it currently offers a complete suite of services across all four segments of MCS: the IT side of printing, business process automation, business process optimization, and emerging services.

Strengths

• Xerox continues to improve its MPS and MCS program, which it sells to a wide range of customers of different sizes and across different regions and industries. It excels in serving multiregional and global accounts. Xerox has in the past been perceived as being more expensive than some of its competitors and carefully selecting which accounts to bid for, but we are now seeing a more price-competitive Xerox, willing to accommodate most potential customers.
• Xerox's Document Analytics and Workflow Assessment Services conducts an automated and systematic analysis of the customer's printing habits in order to help the customer understand the opportunities to streamline and improve business processes, resulting in more efficient performance and less dependence on paper. Customers can start shallow and then, if they like the opportunities they see, can go deeper into the three successive layers of depth. Deeper levels reveal more specifics, such as quantitative, benchmarklike comparisons, as well a qualitative analysis. These can be augmented with consultation to help customers to fully explore and exploit the opportunities. Services of this kind are at the cutting edge of what can be done to minimize the dependence on paper.

Cautions

• While Xerox scores well on its ability to deliver consistent services globally, it does also experience variances in markets where its local services' coverage is less than optimal. If you have remote locations, check with Xerox for SLAs in those areas.
• Like other leading vendors, Xerox's appetite for taking on very large customers and mixed fleets can sometimes mean very long rollouts. If you are a large customer, be prepared for realistic time scales for rollout and to have expectations set for disruption levels.

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or MarketScope may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

Added

No vendors have been added.

Dropped

We have dropped Pitney Bowes this year, because since the breakup of the company through acquisitions, the major new entity, Novitex, does not currently meet our inclusion criteria.

Only vendors that meet all the following criteria are included:

• Provides the equipment (via lease or as a procurement service).
• Provides the supplies.
• Performs the repairs and preventive maintenance.
• Provides the technical support.
• Has at least 25 MPS and MCS customers in total, each with 500 or more users.
• Provides MPS and MCS in two or more world regions to at least one customer. The customer must be verifiable and have at least 500 MPS users. The regions are North America, EMEA, Asia/Pacific (including Japan) and Latin America.
• Provides the long-term tracking and management of the printer/MFP fleet.
• Performs the initial assessment(s).
• Buys back or disposes of existing equipment that is being replaced, if this is required.
• Bills on a per-page or per-seat basis.
• Offers as optional or includes as standard with its MPS, any components that help customers automate or optimize their business processes or manage the network-side elements of printing that take place before jobs reach the printer.

Print-related services that fall short of MPS are excluded. These include traditional, narrowly drawn copier contracts, certain retail printer service packages, and most infrastructure outsourcing contracts. Some genuine MPS providers also did not qualify because they did not meet one or more of our inclusion criteria. Many small MPS providers operate in only one country or location, and thus they do not meet the inclusion criteria for the Magic Quadrant, either. Depending on your requirements and needs, you may want to also consider these providers, as well. Gartner recommends you contact our analysts to discuss your specific circumstances and needs, and to help you determine which of the MPS providers makes sense for your shortlist, whether or not they are in this Magic Quadrant.

The Ability to Execute axis position for each MPS and MCS provider is based on its success in delivering results today, as well as its preparation to deliver results in the future. On this axis, Gartner verifies an MPS and MCS provider's capability to deliver MPS and MCS based on direct feedback from extensive interviews with its clients and other provided customer references. Gartner analysts evaluate MPS and MCS providers on the quality and efficacy of the processes, systems, methods or procedures that enable their performance to be competitive, efficient and effective, and to positively affect revenue, retention and reputation. Ultimately, MPS and MCS providers are judged on their capability and success in capitalizing on their vision. Each criterion is weighted high, medium or low in importance and scored accordingly.

Product or Service: This criterion addresses core goods and services offered by the MPS and MCS provider that competes in and serves the defined market. This includes current product and service capabilities, quality, feature sets and skills. We probed how well the provider ensures that the customer ends up with the right mix of equipment and help throughout the MPS and MCS engagement.

Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy and Organization): Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the business unit's likelihood of continuing to invest in the service solution. We drew on all available sources to gauge how solidly grounded the MPS and MCS providers are today and how safe a bet they are for the future.

Sales Execution/Pricing: This criterion examines each MPS and MCS provider's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel. MPS and MCS agreements can lock in customers for years and can do more harm than good if the terms, conditions and pricing are drawn up wrong. We examine how well the vendor ensures that the customer gets a fair deal that is appropriate for the customer's needs.

Market Responsiveness/Record: This criterion looks at the MPS and MCS providers' ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the provider's history of responsiveness. Successful MPS and MCS engagements cater to the specific needs of the customer at hand. We looked closely at how far the vendor goes to ensure the success of the specific customer.

Marketing Execution: This criterion refers to the clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the MPS and MCS offering, and establish a positive identification with the service/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This mind share can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional activities, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities. Effective marketing is important, because customers struggle to understand exactly what each vendor will do for them and how this differs from one provider to another. We look from all angles at how well the vendor communicates this, and how easy it is for customers to obtain this information.

Customer Experience: This criterion evaluates the relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the MPS and MCS evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups and SLAs. Successful MPS and MCS depend on the provider's relationship with the customer in ways that SLAs and contract clauses can never entirely anticipate and enforce. We look from numerous angles at how well the provider ensures it maintains a good all-around relationship with the customer.

Operations: This criterion reviews the MPS and MCS provider's ability to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis. Office printing is one of those technologies that affect almost everyone, so even small disruptions matter. We look at how the vendor works hand-in-hand with the customer to minimize the disruption to the end users and key stakeholders in the customer organization.

Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria	Weighting
Product or Service	High
Overall Viability	High
Sales Execution/Pricing	High
Market Responsiveness/Record	High
Marketing Execution	High
Customer Experience	High
Operations	High

Source: Gartner (November 2014)

The Completeness of Vision axis reflects each MPS and MCS provider's prospects for success by analyzing its view of the market, service operating model, and strategic plans for growth and service improvements. Gartner verifies an MPS and MCS provider's vision based on presentations from the provider and direct feedback from extensive interviews with the MPS and MCS provider's clients, as well as insight gained while answering Gartner client inquiries on that topic.

Each criterion is weighted high, medium or low in importance and is scored accordingly. Table 2 shows the criteria for evaluating providers' Completeness of Vision.

Market Understanding: This criterion refers to the MPS and MCS provider's ability to understand buyers' needs and translate these needs into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and they can shape or enhance those wants with their added vision. We look at key areas in which the provider can prepare the customer for tomorrow's priorities as well as today's.

Marketing Strategy: This criterion evaluates the MPS and MCS provider's strategy and approach to marketing and promoting MPS. We looked for a clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website, social media, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: This criterion reviews the provider's sales strategy and its capability to sell MPS. It includes the strategy for selling MPS and MCS that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service and communications affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: This criterion addresses the MPS and MCS provider's approach to MPS and MCS development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature set as they map to current and future requirements. Across each of the main elements of MPS and MCS, we examined how the vendor maximizes the benefit of its MPS and MCS to customers.

Business Model: This criterion assesses the soundness and logic of an MPS and MCS provider's underlying business proposition. A sustainable MPS and MCS business model must not only deliver savings and other benefits to customers, but also minimize the risks. We looked at how the vendor protects its customers against the risks inherent in MPS.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The experiences that MPS and MCS providers gain and investments that they make in vertical markets will help them build and retain their customer base in an increasingly competitive market. We assessed the MPS and MCS provider's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including verticals.

Innovation: This criterion includes direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, or defensive or pre-emptive purposes. As MPS matures, customers should expect continued improvements both in what vendors do for them and in how they do it. This depends on judicious investments. We look at the quantity and quality of the providers' investments in MPS and MCS versus the value that they will likely provide to customers.

Geographic Strategy: This refers to the MPS and MCS provider's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries, as appropriate for that geography and market. Many of Gartner's clients have offices scattered across an entire country or region, several continents or the entire world. We evaluated the ability of the providers to accommodate the range of customers' geographies, from local through national, regional, multiregional and global.

Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria	Weighting
Market Understanding	High
Marketing Strategy	High
Sales Strategy	High
Offering (Product) Strategy	High
Business Model	High
Vertical/Industry Strategy	High
Innovation	High
Geographic Strategy	High

Source: Gartner (November 2014)

Leaders provide MPS and MCS to a wide range of customers, including the largest and most geographically dispersed, so they must demonstrate a truly global reach. They must demonstrate not only the skills to deliver today's MPS and MCS, but also the understanding, initiative and resources to prepare for tomorrow's MPS and MCS. Leaders characteristically augment the full scope of MPS with a wide range of added-value services. As a result, they are frequently shortlisted by large and midsize customers.

Although Challengers have solidly demonstrated that they provide the core elements of MPS and MCS, they communicate a less complete view of the market direction than Leaders. The package of services they offer and the way it is marketed may also cater to a somewhat narrower range of company sizes and industries than that of Leaders. Even when the customers are the same as for Leaders, the scope of engagement may be narrower. There are no Challengers in this Magic Quadrant.

Visionaries thoroughly understand today's market and also know how to address customers' future needs and expectations. In the aggregate, they provide a wide range of MPS to a diverse range of customers and are showing vision on MCS offerings.

Niche Players meet all our inclusion criteria but provide a more-narrow range of services to a more-narrow range of customers than the other vendors. They may be a cost-effective choice for customers whose requirements, scale and geographical scope happen to be a good match. They may also cater to specific industries. Some customers also report that the Niche Players pay them especially close attention and are generally more accommodating than large vendors.

Context

Gartner's MPS and MCS Magic Quadrant is a useful starting point for identifying and evaluating MPS and MCS providers. It is intended for Gartner's client base of mainly midsize and large organizations, many of which operate throughout two or more regions, and some of which are truly global. Although not all MPS and MCS projects are multiregional or global at the outset, customers often choose to scale up one region at a time. In this way, they can manage their office printing in a unified manner globally. The providers in this Magic Quadrant have the geographical scale to attend to your office printing needs across world regions in a coordinated way.

Numerous other MPS and MCS providers approach their MPS and MPS projects locally, country by country, or region by region and cater to like-minded customers, but they do not appear in this Magic Quadrant. Why not? As organizations progress from the prevailing loosely managed approach to an efficiently and closely managed one, it makes sense to manage the entire fleet in a unified way, rather than with today's characteristically fragmented approach. Naturally, some MPS customers are organized in a way that makes a unified fleet impossible or are confined to one country or region.

Your provider selection should be based on a detailed evaluation of your office printing needs and goals compared with a service provider's capacity to fulfill those requirements and expectations. The fact that a service provider falls into the Leaders quadrant does not automatically make it the right choice for you. All selections are buyer-specific, so providers in the Challengers, Visionaries or Niche Players quadrants may sometimes be a better match for your requirements. For smaller organizations or large ones situated mostly in a single locale, providers in the Niche Players quadrant may be the most attentive and most cost-effective match. Some Niche Players cater to specific industries. ARC, located in the Niche Players quadrant, is a case in point because it specializes in the AEC vertical.

All the providers ranked in this Magic Quadrant are large, established companies, so buyers should not assume that the Visionaries or Niche Players are likely to drop out of the market in the near future.

Note that MPS and MCS are not right for everyone, and if you are unprepared to revisit the equipment and services that you need for the job, MPS and MCS will not produce results for you. Also, if you can trust an outside vendor to do no more than sell you equipment, repair it and provide the supplies, then you should seek a traditional purchase or lease arrangement. In this case, the savings opportunity will likely be smaller — 5%, rather than 10% to 30%. You will also need to take full responsibility for choosing the right mix of equipment and services, which would be the provider's responsibility under MPS.

Market Overview

MPS is maturing and changing, and prospective buyers — even ones who have completed previous vendor selections or who are comfortable with their incumbent MPS provider — must understand where MPS is today, where it is headed, where MCS fits in and what is holding it back.

MPS is a growing service market. Once mainly limited to the most developed countries and the largest customers, MPS is now growing in developing regions, such as Asia/Pacific, and it is growing most rapidly among small and midsize companies.

MPS providers are finally able to reliably deliver on their promises, thanks to more than 10 years of customer experience, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars spent on process refinement, training, software and staffing. Customers can expect solid MPS from providers in all four quadrants, and not only from the largest and most long-standing ones.

As a result, large and midsize customers alike are able, to some degree, to take advantage of intense competition between vendors to ensure competitive prices and good treatment. At the same time, what customers actually buy under MPS is gradually expanding from fleet optimization services, equipment and supplies, and printed pages to other, added-value, deliverables.

For example, most MPS buyers we advise from Gartner's diverse base of roughly 10,000 client organizations are either using or considering pull-printing solutions to secure their printed documents and reduce their print volumes, and MPS providers must now step up to the challenges of fully supporting them, which is sometimes tricky. But the biggest risk that MPS buyers face is selling their own MPS engagement short by limiting their consideration of the cost benefits and value to the infrastructure and by leaving line-of-business departments out of the picture.

Many customers we speak to give short shrift to user-side benefits that go beyond hard cost savings. Rather than treating MPS as a project and appointing experienced project managers, some customers pay so little time and attention to the process that they never completely optimize the printer fleet, which is one of the main reasons for choosing MPS to begin with. This approach undercuts the opportunity today and will undercut it even more sharply in the future.

Workplaces are changing under the combined trends toward mobility, data analytics, cloud computing and social media, and customers need to understand how the role of MPS is changing with them. Although MPS is growing, the shipments of office printing equipment are gradually decreasing.

This makes it difficult for buyers to anticipate their future needs, but it is not so sharp a decrease that buyers can simply ignore the subject altogether. Buyers who don't do careful needs assessments may find themselves overspending on equipment and other resources. Naturally, with page volumes declining, such an assessment must look beyond historical and current printing needs to anticipate future demand, and that means looking at what is being printed and eliminating pages that are not really needed.

Page volume levels vary between different organizations in the same industry by a factor of two to three, indicating gaps in how effectively some organizations go about their business processes, handle information and documents, and communicate. The role of MPS, thus, will change gradually from simply helping customers optimize their printers and MFPs, to helping them handle documents more efficiently and eliminate printing where practical. The industry-specific needs assessments are a starting point and one more step in the transition from MPS to the service we call "managed content services."

MCS has modest beginnings with today's solutions for scanning and routing documents, replacing paper forms with digital ones, and helping users digitally search paper documents, but it will, over the next three to five years, help customers keep up with even steeper challenges that IT organizations and business departments will face.

In a basic sense, the shift to MCS is well underway, with many MPS engagements rolling in software that monitors how much users print or that holds print jobs on a server until users have authenticated themselves at the MFP (known as "pull printing"). Eager to shed their paper-centric image, MPS providers — all of which actually depend heavily on printing revenue — have taken to describing themselves in terms of content or documents.

Some have actually diversified into document management services and solutions as well, but this is mostly a separate line of business, with little real synergy with their office printing and MPS. For printer manufacturers, then, MCS is a way to make that vision of reducing their dependence on printing into a reality. The thing that is holding back MCS today is mainly trust and access to, and engagement with, the line-of-business leadership. Based on our continual reviews of MPS proposals and contracts, software and solutions today account for only 5% or less of MPS spending.

The main barrier is that customers' purchasing and IT departments control MPS planning and vendor selection, and most are reluctant to complicate what they see as a simple infrastructure project with business-specific solutions and consultative help that happen to fall outside their own areas of responsibility.

Accustomed to hardball copier negotiations, they tend to keep their MPS providers at arm's length, and deny them access to the line-of-business managers who stand to benefit from faster and more reliable business processes. Trust is a two-way street, though, and MPS providers must recognize that their customers are getting the wrong signal when, as many have told us, the MPS provider failed to comprehensively support the pull-printing and job accounting software that it sold the customer, pushing the responsibility to the software developer and leaving the customer in the middle.

Choose your MPS and MCS provider on its ability to help you optimize your printer fleet and keep it optimal. Beyond the obvious equipment, supplies and technical support, this includes the needs assessment, ongoing tracking and consultative help, as well as software-based components, such as pull printing and mobile printing services.

Take into consideration any value-adds that make sense for you today, such as workflow packages for business process and forms or for scanning and searching paper documents. At today's level of maturity, all MPS and MCS providers should be able to provide all these things, but how they go about it, at what cost and with what kind of foresight (around such risks as diminishing page volumes) will influence your selection. Don't stop there, though: Anticipate the help you'll need to streamline the business processes that generate much of your printing, and to help users reduce their dependence on paper for their ad hoc communications and carry them out more effectively.

Choose an MPS and MCS provider that you believe will be able to help you meet these needs as they arise in coming years, even if they are not part of your current charter for MPS. In this way, you will end up with the best MPS and MCS provider for the entire length of the engagement and minimize the need to switch when the contract is up in three to five years.

Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

Gartner Research Note G00260810, Ken Weilerstein, Elizabeth Kim, Sharon McNee, 6 November 2014