Document solutions market poised for greater heights

In the inaugural report of its new Asia/Pacific Document Solutions Research
Service, IDC estimated the market (for hardcopy peripheral vendors) for Document
Solutions in Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) to be worth $94.3 million in
2005, growing almost 80 percent over 2004. IDC found that the APEJ document
solutions market is young and poised for sustained high growth from 2006-2010 as
hardcopy peripheral manufacturers seek new ways to compete effectively.

“Demand for document solutions will grow as businesses across the region
strive to improve document-based workflow in a business environment that is
still heavily dependent on paper. This, coupled with the manu­facturers'
active efforts to add differentiating value to their hardware, will be the key
growth engines for document solutions,” said Edwin Han, Senior Research
Manager, IDC's Asia/Pacific Document Solutions Research.

The smaller manufacturers are now beginning to feel a significant competitive
squeeze as they have tended to rely much more heavily on hardware-only business
strategies than their bigger, more sophisticated competitors. As a result, in
order to hold market share, they are aggressively embarking on document solution
programs of their own - something they have not done in the recent past. Many of
these smaller manufacturers are beginning to build the necessary competencies
and resources to sell and market document solutions.

The bigger and more dominant manufacturers like Fuji, Xerox, Canon, HP and
Ricoh, who already are in the document solutions game, are getting more active
in marketing document solutions, as competitive pressures reduce hardware
revenue and profit growth opportunities.

The Asia/Pacific hardcopy peripheral marketplace is highly competitive-not
just in hardware, but in the total cost of ownership. The market is only going
to get more competitive as the hardcopy peripheral manufacturers try to out-do
and out-sell each other.

Regulatory compliance, improved records management, and the insatiable needs
of driving costs down and workplace efficiencies up are other key factors that
will drive document solutions adoption. The growing content management software
market is also helping to drive demand for document solutions.

IDC defines document solutions as software applications and professional
services that are integrated, “bundled” or in some way work with hardcopy
peripheral hardware to enhance its functionality. IDC's definition explicitly
excludes hardware, which is covered separately by IDC's Asia/Pacific
peripherals tracker research. Examples of document solutions software
applications include bill or transactional printing applications, document
distribution and management applications, output management applications and
security applications.

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