The new Tigerpaw integration is not just aimed at allowing their present MSPs to add a managed print services capability, but at reaching out to office equipment dealers who need to diversify their businesses to survive.

PSA [professional services automation] vendor Tigerpaw Software has announced a new integration to its platform which provides full end-to-end support of managed print services delivery. It comes through a partnership with Calgary-based managed print tool maker Print Audit.

Tigerpaw’s top partners won’t be surprised by this news. James Foxall, Tigerpaw’s CEO, mentioned this integration was coming during his keynote at the company’s partner day in Omaha last October.

“We’ve been working with Print Audit for a while to get to the point where we are today,” Foxall said. “The integration is built, it has been through beta, and it’s ready to go.”

With this integration, Tigerpaw can both offer its existing MSPs a new end-to-end service, and reach out to existing office products dealers and managed print providers who are under severe pressure in their existing business models.

“Our goal here is to modernize the managed print space, which has been under pressure, with shrinking margins, for some time,” Foxall said. “We offer them the tools to be successful, not just help them run their MPS business better, but to be able to grow their business and diversify it, as opposed to watching it shrink.”

Foxall sees a strong parallel between the office equipment space and the telecom space of 15 years ago.

“Back then, when phone systems were proprietary, the voice guys had a stranglehold on the market, and when it moved into IP-based technology, that completely changed the landscape,” he said. “It put these businesses under threat and forced them to diversify, and the ones that succeeded made that switch into IT and managed services – unified communications. Today the office equipment guys are in the same spot, with shrinking margins. If their owners want to get value out of their companies, they have to think about diversification. We helped the voice guys make that transition and we want to do the same thing for the office equipment companies.”

With this integration, Tigerpaw’s platform now facilitates end-to-end support of managed print service delivery – from initial sale through ongoing billing of complex metered print services.

“Print Audit does a number of things, and a big one is meter reads,” Foxall said. “All the print devices have meters, and they can have many meters for things like colour, black and white, and scanning. Because of this, you can’t just write a simple API to communicate. Print Audit has developed a technology to talk to all those devices and that becomes very important from a billing perspective. Tigerpaw already has a great automated billing and process procedure. So the integration can feed us in real time all those meter reads, so we can tell what the MSP should bill the client, and then bill the clients for them. It’s all one hundred per cent touch-free.”

Tigerpaw can track an unlimited number of meters by item and contract for more accurate billing. The metered groups can be billed either by flat rate, volume or tiered pricing. Device alerts are provided for printing and supplies. Billing is fully automated. And detailed reports help customers track efficiencies across devices.

While the new Managed Print Services integration gives legacy print vendors a new market option, it also provides Tigerpaw’s core MSP market with an offering they had been unable to wield before. While Tigerpaw’s billing engine has always been able to pull in asset information from the RMMs with whom they integrate, the Print Audit partnership extends that to the printer side for the first time.

“It’s an add-on to the billing piece we had, but it opens up a new world for MSPs in the managed print space,” Foxall said.

“I’ve been fascinated over the years how MSPs have avoided the print space. That has to do with challenges they had to address then, like needing certified techs, rolling trucks for consumables and stocking up parts. That has been a barrier to entry. There are now companies that offer white labelled managed print, so they can get in. These white label options drop the levels to entry dramatically. That’s the way to go because for an MSP, adding managed print on their own is a massive hurdle.

“For our existing partners, this gives them the opportunity to work with the white label providers and add a new profitable line of business to their company with relatively little effort,” Foxall added. “With the white label services, you don’t need to skill up to support it, although you will have to learn how to sell it effectively.”