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By Louella Fernandes, Quocirca

The proliferation of smartphones and tablets in the workplace, driven by broader adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), has led to renewed predictions that mobility will usher in the paperless era. Yet, paper remains omnipresent in most businesses, with Quocirca’s research showing that almost 70% still depend on printing to support business processes. Whilst various industry estimates claim that mobility increase productivity by anywhere up to 40%, printing is often a forgotten part of the equation, and many today still need and want to print. Even if overall volumes may be on the decline, the opportunity to print higher quality colour documents – from a smartphone or tablet is one the printer industry has been working hard to capture.

Whether it’s a consumer need for printing boarding passes or a business need to print a complex business colour document, most mobile print solutions available today only partly address the printing needs of the user. So far, the ease of printing from mobile devices has been anything but simple – the diversity of mobile operating systems combined with the mix of printers and copiers, all with their own proprietary standards, means that mobile print adoption has been slow. Many vendors have come up with their own mobile print applications – some are simple apps, some print by sending the document to a private cloud as an email attachment which can be printed at any device and some offer direct printing to new devices only.  And in many cases printer driver features may be limited to standard default settings, meaning that advanced features such as duplex or booklet printing may not be supported. There may also be a cost premium to implement mobile printing, which is in contrast to the desktop printing approach which simply requires download of a free printer driver.

This has created some confusion andScreen Shot 2013-09-24 at 12.38.13 PM complexity in the market, somewhat hindering adoption. In Quocirca’s recent study of enterprises, around 15% have adopted mobile print solutions, whilst around although 30% investigating or planning to adopt some form of mobile printing. The lack of a standardised platform for mobile printing represents a lost opportunity for printer manufacturers to capture pages as they shift from the desktop environment.

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