RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 71

By Chris Angelini

Too many SMBs get spooked when it comes time to procure hardware. They take the easy road out-—the path of least expense-—even in the face of technology that promises to save money over the course of its lifetime. You can spot this mentality whenever you walk into an office with brand new workstations connected to CRT displays. You wonder why nobody told these guys that LCDs use way less energy, save all sorts of desk space, and really don’t cost much more.

The same goes for printers. Sometimes the problem is bad: Every desk has its own inkjet. Other times, laser printers scattered around the office indicate that someone, at some point, had the right idea but never followed through on a printing strategy that would cut back on consumable spending.

When you upsell a Small Business Server 2003 machine, the idea is to help your customer get organized, protect himself against disaster, make employees more productive, and so on. The same concept holds true in network storage sales, as well, where the idea is to centralize data and make it easier to access. Take a page from the enterprise playbook, in other words, and rewrite it for a smaller team.

Resellers able to apply the enterprise mentality to printing not only stand to save their customers big money on consumables, but also enable powerful new features to which SMBs wouldn’t otherwise have had access. Of course, picking the best print solution means sitting down with your customer, evaluating his needs, and balancing some of the exciting extras available to him.

Print Technology

The reason so many SMBs gravitate toward inkjet technology is its noticeably lower up-front cost. A modestly-configured Canon PIXMA iP1800 sells for less than $50 online, opening the door to color printing at resolutions as high as 4800x1200. That’s perfect for the home user turning digital photos into borderless 4”x6” prints two or three times a month. But even a small business cranking out 50 pages of invoices, purchase orders, and receipts every day is going to burn through that little printer’s ink tank in no time at all, beginning a painful cycle of consumable replacement.

What might have started as an inexpensive play on value quickly turns into a resource drain. The situation is bad enough when there’s only one inkjet in question. I’ve been to offices with 10 computers and 10 inkjets. The three-packs of black ink tanks in the back said, “Yes, we know these inexpensive printers are killing us on consumables, but what other choice is there?”

Do the math with your SMB customer. Divide the cost of an ink tank by the number of pages it yields (generally a couple hundred or so, depending on coverage). That’ll give you cost per page, which often lands between 10 and 20 cents. Now come up with a rough estimate of how many pages your customer prints per day. If you figure a three-year service life, it should be easy to determine the total cost of ink. Suddenly, $50 up front for the hardware doesn’t seem like such a great deal.

Laser printers, on the other hand, load cost onto the front end of the sale. Though they’re more affordable now than ever before, businesses should expect to pay hundreds of dollars to get in the door. Once they’re in, the benefits are immediate. Twenty dollar ink tanks good for 200 pages give way to $100 toner cartridges that will cover thousands of pages. The cost per page drops to pennies, and value soars as your customer’s output rises.

Talking Features

Given comparable quality, similar speed, and the same duty cycle, laser printers cost less than inkjets over time. That much is a given. But lasers are also able to deliver faster performance, higher duty cycles, and, in certain cases, better quality.

We’ll start with quality, the most subjective measure of value. You simply cannot match the monochrome output of a laser. Sharp lines and uniform coverage beat out inkjet technology’s best efforts. As SMBs venture into color printing, they’ll generally find that color laser prints look better than inexpensive inkjets, as well. Only as you veer toward photo printing does inkjet technology really shine. And even then, businesses truly interested in sharp photos should pay some mind to dye sublimation technology instead.

The decision to move from inkjet to laser should hinge also on the amount of printing your customer plans to do. That’s not to say that all laser printers outperform inkjets. After all, some of HP’s older business inkjets were able to do 10,000 pages per month. But those were $1,000+ printers, not the $99 bargains many businesses buy. You’re more likely to find that a $50 printer will do, at most, 1,000 pages per month before it starts wearing prematurely. A monochrome laser such as HP’s LaserJet P3005 is rated for up to 100,000 pages with a recommended print volume in the 5,000-page range.

Moreover, the P3005 churns out up to 35 pages per minute, while most inkjets hover under the 10 page-per-minute mark at normal print quality settings. Laser printers do have to warm up before delivering output, subjecting them to a first-page-out delay. But the P3005’s print speed, even at its top quality setting, more than makes up for its rating of less than 10 seconds.

When all is said and done, very few SMBs are going to upgrade an existing cluster of inkjet printers because of monochrome quality or printer performance. Duty cycle might come into play if your customer suddenly finds himself printing twice as many pages a day, but again, that’s more of a side effect of upgrading rather than a reason.

Sharing Is Caring

Businesses loaded down with inexpensive inkjets are usually the same ones running on peer-to-peer networks, if they’re running on a network at all. You walk in the door knowing that IT spending probably isn’t on the budget, so it’s incredibly important to make price a priority. You talk to the business owner, demonstrating the technologies borrowed from larger enterprises and adapted for SMBs. He’s impressed. He didn’t know a server, network storage appliance, and backup solution were so affordable. But while all three help organize and protect data, they don’t explicitly save money compared to the bought-and-paid-for solution already in place. Add a robust printer to the equation, though, and you’re talking about real savings.

In an environment with 10 workstations, each sporting its own printer, 100 pages of combined daily output might be a reasonable expectation. If the printers are already a couple of years old, replacements probably aren’t too far over the horizon. Ten $50 printers (none of which probably integrate paper sensing or ink conservation functionality to help lower overall usage costs) still add up to a chunk of change, especially for lower-end functionality more suited to home use. Then you can start doing the consumable math.

This is a great chance to upsell a true business printer that the whole office can use, such as HP’s Color LaserJet 4700 series. The entry-level model starts at $1,349, is incredibly scalable, and comes with more standard features than any desktop inkjet. Central to its utility is network connectivity. All four LaserJet 4700 series printers sport bi-directional parallel ports, USB 2.0, two open EIO slots for print server upgrades, and an accessory port. If you’re attaching to an always-on server shared across the LAN, you can get away with simply sharing the 4700. A better solution would be to snag a print server, which HP sells separately, facilitating independent operation over the network.

Working as its own network node, the LaserJet 4700 has to be able to cope with print requests from network clients. In our example, it would be 10 workstations sending print jobs of various sizes throughout the day. Business customers used to printing on “dumb” inkjets expect to wait for longer requests to spool through, often hammering performance on their workstations. But the base model 4700n has 160MB of built-in memory where it temporarily holds incoming files.

As you work your way up the family, two other models come with 288MB, and the flagship features 544MB. An onboard 533 MHz processor does the legwork, freeing up performance on employee workstations almost immediately. The top-end 4700ph+ also comes with a 40GB embedded hard drive, where customers can permanently store frequently used documents. An information screen on the 4700 itself provides access to those documents, making it possible to print directly. Other models in the 4700 series support the hard drive through an EIO slot upgrade available at any time after the sale.

Greater Than The SUm

Most small business customers have never owned a printer able to grow according to the company’s needs. HP’s 4700n can. With a recommended monthly duty cycle between 2,500 and 10,000 pages, there’s plenty of room for volume fluctuations. The printer’s base configuration includes two paper trays with a standard input capacity of 600 sheets. Add up to four more and you’re looking at a maximum of 2,600 sheets and a maximum output capacity of 500.

Although the 4700n sports 160MB of memory standard, it’ll take up to 544MB (32MB of which is built into the formatter). The printer also ships sans hard drive. You add that later as you need it. Connect the 4700n via USB 2.0 or a legacy parallel port. Mix in a networked print server as needed. All the while, your customer enjoys 600 dpi monochrome and color printing at speeds of up to 31 pages per minute.

If paying more than $1,000 for a printer with so many optional extras is giving your customer sticker shock, introduce something a little more affordable while preserving the 4700n’s scalability and performance. HP’s Color LaserJet CP3505n is a good example, starting at $899. Though it’s only about $500 less than the company’s 4700 series base model, fewer extras keep the printer’s price from creeping too high.

Some of the CP3505n’s specs show signs of compromise. Performance drops to 22 pages per minute, for instance. The recommended monthly duty cycle maxes out at 5,000 pages instead of 10,000. It takes three seconds longer to crank out the first page of a print job as the printer’s CPU sheds 100 MHz. And instead of stacking up to six paper trays, the CP3505n tops out at three.

But it’s not all doom and gloom when you shoot to save your customer some money. Not only does HP’s CP3505n still do monochrome and color output, but it does both at 1200x600 dpi, up from 600x600. Additionally, your customer gets 256MB of memory (expandable to 1GB) instead of 160MB. There’s only one SO-DIMM memory slot, but the CP3505n’s connectivity suite includes an embedded JetDirect Fast Ethernet print server, so it’s ready to be networked as soon as you take it out of the box.

Partners In Printing

HP happens to be prolific both in small business-friendly servers and print technology. Combining the two facets of HP’s business (both of which are available in the channel through distributors such as SYNNEX) is a great way to make some money building complete solutions under one marquee where you might have otherwise been the third wheel.

On the flip side, even if a small business is willing to buy whitebox servers, it’s still going to need print equipment. The same benefits applied to branded-only shops count here. Sell your servers based on Intel or Supermicro platforms, complemented by a trusted name in printing such as HP.

No matter which direction your customer leans, pairing up with the right printer vendor adds even more value to your SMB deployments. HP happens to offer lots of laser-based product, which outclasses inkjet in nearly every way. Leverage laser as a means to save money on consumables, centralize printing on one device without sacrificing performance, and extend enterprise-class functionality to a market that was once able to rely on inexpensive desktop technology.