Fifteen years ago, the enterprise printing market was primarily about finding the best third-party print server device to correctly spool printing requests and send the output correctly formatted to the appropriate printer. Intel and Hewlett Packard ruled the roost with print server offerings that could network up to three printers at a time, while attaching themselves as a node to an ordinary Novell or Windows PC network. At that time, PCs were not powerful enough or cost effective enough to handle all of the functions that an independent print server could. Enterprise print solutions were therefore handled by this type of device. Over the course of the past decade, increasingly robust PCs and the corresponding evolution of a software driver library for Linux and Unix machines allowed for the CUPS printing system to be developed. Instead of having a separate node on the network handle enterprise printing needs, it became possible to interface with an unlimited number of printers from the same dedicated print server, which was usually a Unix box or a PC. On the Windows side, print management also evolved so that directory services came to handle discovery and permissions, and spooling was done locally for any printer within the enterprise.

The problem, of course, after creating massive farms of printers that could be used by almost any worker in any enterprise boiled down to two considerations: cost and convenience. On the cost side, freeing workers to print anything they wanted from multiple resources sent the overall organizational print costs through the roof. With regard to convenience, even if cost controls were put in place, each enterprise organization was now effectively in the print shop business, requiring a staff of IT specialists to configure and maintain their fleet of printers; while being confined to only purchasing printers that were within their budget.

Thus the print management solutions firms started to gain traction in the enterprise IT market. Often offering concise management of print resources via seamless software solutions, the companies began to partner with enterprise firms to help lower the cost of each company’s print business. For many enterprise companies, learning that they could lower the cost of printing a page by using a print management partner, was enough for them to consider adopting the proposed solutions. For firms that chose partners that also provided printing equipment, the range of printing choices for employees grew considerably, as a large range of specialized equipment was already owned or leased by their partner.