Make More Prints Make More Prints – how is that for a headline you have not seen for a while. Especially written by this service person. Read on…new printing opportunities, service apps and solutions will follow. There is a silver lining to this Cloud story. Recently I was attending a pricey two day educational conference designed for meeting planners. These are the professionals who are hired to create, plan and execute all those glitzy meetings the OEM’s, trade associations, business, government and other entities use when outsourcing. This conference had an entire educational track dedicated to learning more about using social media and technology to add value to your meetings. I was very impressed with the level of knowledge and sophistication that was presented. The question and answer periods also proved the elevated level of familiarity of the complex use of technology within the audience. Bottom line; these people were serious users of state of the art technology. During one of the education sessions tables of 8 attendees were asked to discuss a technology challenge and share the resulting solution with the group. When it came time for one member of our table to share our discussion I volunteered to talk about the use of smart phones and tablets to create hard copy prints. Instantly, 70 sets of eyes darted in my direction. The speaker, a VP at a state of the art meeting planning Software Company, stepped around the podium and asked me to elaborate. “Create hard copy prints from a smart phone? Is that possible? How is that done?” I had been researching cloud printing for an article I was writing, so my answer was extremely coherent and specific. Google Chrome, free apps, Toshiba / Cortado Cloud Printing Alliance, Xerox Managed Print Services over Cisco Borderless Networks; my words flowed out. Printing via the Cloud has come of age. At the end of this educational session a dozen attendees quickly approached me. I was asked more questions, business cards were exchanged. A genuine sense of need was expressed. These sophisticated business professionals, with spendable technology money in their budgets, craved more information. They were definite prospects for buying and using cloud printing abilities for their future meetings. Mobile printing is here and now. Office solution business professionals must be the ambassadors of cloud printing. Spread the word. Service and sales must make a commitment to talk about printing directly from your smart phone or tablet with each customer contact. It can be as easy as making a set of generic company business cards with your company information on the front and a cloud printing graphic, similar to this one that Google uses, on the back of the card. Sales and service reps can quickly explain the concept, using the business card graphic. “If you want more information, I can have someone follow-up with you or just give the number on the card a call.” Once the contact is made, your sales or service rep can easily explain the basic concept. You can add cloud printing, set-up and usage to your MPS agreement. Installation and/or training can be on a per phone, tablet or printer basis. In any case, cloud printing can add additional prints to your monthly base of clicks. Google’s stated goal is to build a printing experience that enables any app on any device to print to any printer anywhere in the world. Google uses a cloud print service. Apps no longer rely on the local operating system (and drivers) to print. Instead, apps (whether they are a native desktop/mobile app or a web app) use Google Cloud Print to submit and manage print jobs. Google Cloud Print sends the print job to the appropriate printer. Google is one of a growing number of companies that offers direct access to cloud printing. Google’s Cloud Print allows you to register one or more of your printers with Google’s and associate them to your GMail account. You can then print e-mails and selected attachments directly from your phone’s GMail interface, regardless of whether you are on the same network as your printers or not. The registration process consists of downloading a special beta version of Google Chrome from the Cloud Print Website, installing it on a computer connected to a printer that you want to make available through the service, and enabling the printer. The direct importance for the print on paper industry is that cloud computing can increase the number of printed pages throughout the world. Gartner Research describes cloud printing as, “the next digital printing breakthrough, changing the business model from costly and limited ownership to flexible anytime anywhere access to printed communication.” Gartner goes on to estimate “that 90% of the Global 1000 will be utilizing Cloud Print Services by 2015. Currently over 10% of the Global 1000 already employ Cloud Print Services.” For the (former) copier dealer, Cloud computing and printing is a natural extension of Managed Print Services. When using MPS the end user transfers all their needs for obtaining hardware, software, supplies and service to an outside source. The user agrees to pay a specific amount of money for each image that is made to the company that is managing their MPS program. In cloud computing, the user agrees to pay a fee to have another organization handle all the details that enables their computer system to provide all the solutions they require. One of the key selling points of MPS is to save money by reducing printed documents by leveraging technology. This is accomplished by mandating the use of scanning, storage, retrieval, instant messaging, automatic emailing, defaulting to monochrome prints, color accessibility via password protection, double sided images, etc. The entire concept of MPS is to ultimately decrease printing on paper. Cloud printing will actually enable and encourage the making of more prints. Cloud printing allows a user to take a picture and print the electronic image on their home, office or any printer of their choice. Cloud technology provides an additional way for printers and MFPs to be used. Better still, images taken with and transmitted via smart phones will usually be printed in color at a higher price per click. A statistic that is important to copier and MPS resellers is 80% of all people using the internet will soon be connected through their mobile phones. With the emerging technical advancements of cloud printing capabilities, 80% of 3,400,000 active mobile phone users have the technical ability to send a color image directly to a printer located anywhere in the world. The worldwide print on paper base just increased by 2,720,000 smart phones and tablets. More good news for the print on paper industry is the stage is being set and financed by others for an additional way to create more prints on paper. After ten years of MPS trying to lessen the amount of prints being made, Cloud computing is opening an entirely new way to create and send technology that can be printed on paper using the devices we sell and service. Better still, much of the information being sent from smart phones and tables, through the clouds, will be printed on new and legacy printers in full color. Now is the time to embrace cloud computing and printing. For those who talk directly with end users, start discussing the advances of cloud technology. During sales calls to end users diplomatically mention the newest cloud technology tool available to smart phone and tablet users. Imagine all the documents and photos that can be sent directly to an office printer from outside their business. This is much easier than faxing or scanning. You can send quality prints to your home or office printer. The fear of a paperless office has just found a new ambassador of good will. Cloud printing enables smart phone and tablet images to be transferred to the printed paper with the help of printers and MFPs that office equipment dealers sell and service. Printing through the clouds is creating a silver lining for the office solutions industry.