The industry of printing and image processing has for dozens of years been associated with sales of equipment. The services of market players have been an «inevitable evil», a byproduct of the highly-profitable business of sales of equipment and still more-profitable business of the sales of expendables. The services and that area primarily implied repair and other «service support» of equipment required by users but never being the core of business.

ENSA@WORK 2004: in search of cost reduction, enterprises have been giving increasing attention to print systems.
One of the components of the strategy of adaptive enterprise actively discussed at the Munich Conference ENSA@WORK 2004, organized by Hewlett-Packard, is print management. According to the analytical Gartner Company, print, copying and similar methods of information representation are among those corporate costs that are difficult to monitor; and in most enterprises those costs can be reduced by 10-30%. According to Gartner, print costs account for about 1-3% of the enterprise budget.

The awareness at the beginning of the present decade that the onset of the Internet epoch has not served as an impetus to a substantial decrease of the scale of user printing but rather conversely, which led a number of organizations to searching for methods for drastic reduction in printer print costs.