Richard De Lay

Ricoh UK, London

Head of Marketing

I read with interest your news piece reporting on IDC’s research into the relative spend on printing and security.

The figures are no surprise considering the amount of money companies unnecessarily overspend on printing facilities. Whilst many have been quick to blame the price of cartridges for the high figures, the truth is that so many organisations do not monitor their print facilities closely enough to control costs effectively.

A failure to manage print and copy facilities means that businesses regularly under use multifunctional devices (MFDs), allowing users to send jobs to print on desktop devices, therefore completely negating the purpose of the machine.

If manufacturers spent more time educating businesses as to how they can make better use of their existing MFD technology to reduce the cost of printing to the organisation, then the figures that IDC has reported would show security spend to be significantly greater than that of print expenditure.