After laying low for the last several months, printer manufacturer Oki Data Americas Inc. introduced a plethora of new printers during a press event recently held in New York.
Included in Oki Data’s new offerings are five monochrome and two digital colour printers.
When it comes to printers, “customers want colour,” but there is still a big demand for the monochrome lines as well, explained Stewart Krentzman, Oki Data’s president and CEO.
On the other end of the spectrum, colour printers are becoming more prevalent in the workplace, according to Scott Becker, vice-president of marketing at Oki Data, because they are starting to become more affordable. He added that customers are starting to do colour prints in-house, which they had previously paid outside organizations to do.
Serial dot matrix printers is where Oki Data has shown strength in the past, said Jennifer Thorwart, senior research analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass. But the company has been picking up steam over the past year with its colour printing offerings, she added.
While currently limited to American customers, Oki Data also introduced its managed services program, which it divides into three stages.
First, Oki will perform a complete physical audit on all of a company’s printers in order to help customers understand the true cost of printing. The second phase takes the information gathered in the first phase and uses it to determine whether the customer needs new printers or whether it can simply redeploy its existing technology.
The third piece of the puzzle, the management phase, provides full-lifecycle management software to the company.
There is no timeframe in place for when Canadians can expect Oki Data’s managed services to be available north of the border.