There are two major trends taking place in end-user devices today. “Mobility is the visible part. We all see people are moving more towards more towards laptops, PDAs, and other devices but on the other hand, if you look at large corporations, for the desktop they are looking more toward a virtualization trend,” explained Anil Kumar, PSG category manager at Hewlett-Packard.
There is a big trend towards mobility in the MENA region whether it is in consumer products for the entertainment machine and education, or one takes the professional users who prefer to have a classical library, scalability, expandability, and security built-in. Mobility and the demand for laptops and notebooks in the KSA and UAE is 55% much more than Europe, according to Kumar. In the Levant, Lebanon is leading in the mobility trend while Jordan’s ICT focus is more on the educational perspective and hence mainly on desk-based products. Egypt also is more focused on desk-based products because of its overall low computer penetration.
The other trend taking place in desktop computers is virtualization. As Kumar pointed out, “For many professionals, they just need to have a device for a particular operation and don’t need to have a very powerful PC, so you see blade PCs creeping into the market.”
For the region as a whole, notebooks overtook desktops for the first time in the consumer PC market, with close to 21 million consumer notebooks shipped versus 16.5 million consumer desktops, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). HP has maintained a strong performance in reaching 28% growth in first quarter 2008 thanks to solid execution across all segments, which allows the vendor to take over 20% share of the total market. HP continued to drive share consolidation in the desktop space and robust share gains in both the commercial and consumer notebook market through an effective go-to-market, strong product portfolio, and aggressive pricing strategies.
For printing solutions, Amr Hassan, general manager of Imaging and Printing Group at HP Middle East explained, “The future trend is moving from PC-enabled printing solutions to internet-enabled printing. It’s all about sharing the story and using IT to help us enjoy our lives more. HP is working to make it easy to use and affordable.”
For enterprises the trend is to cut costs, and to achieve greater efficiency and control. “Ten years ago, office solutions were an IT server and a network, five years ago enterprises focused on consolidation of workstations. The image and printing infrastructure part was not touched until just recently. Gartner [an ICT research and advisory firm] said clearly that 35% of operational costs are consumed by the printing and document management,” according to Hassan. What HP, which maintains a 70% market share on the printing side, is doing today is to streamline the documentation process from creation to archiving.
“In a lot of cases for our enterprise clients, we are able to cut down 25% of their operational costs,” Hassan said. This is done by “balanced deployment” where HP as a consultant determines where to centralize or decentralize printing networks within an organization according to their needs. It also includes reigning in control of the networks so that departments are allowed specific access or controlled printing capabilities, such as tailoring printing of certain data to only black and white while allowing other documents to be printed in color.
“HP can control by department, application, by function or individual. It’s a tremendous way of managing the operation costs of printing by applying the balanced deployment and total print concept,” said Hassan. Savings also come from advancements in energy savings which is lowers the cost per page. Multifunction or all-in-one printers also cut energy costs.
This region is changing in its demand in printing solutions. What happened in Europe four or five years ago in the SME space is happening now in the Middle East in terms of consolidation of companies to be able compete. For enterprises this means that they shift from transactions where they simply bought printers to a value where they buy solutions and find out what is required for them to able to compete. In Hassan’s opinion, “For SME and enterprises, we are transforming to get close to mature or developed countries, for consumers we are already there.”
