eWEEK Europe

Printers are all too often overlooked in an IT purchasing strategy - and this is a great shame. Your printers directly produce the material customers and business partners see, and they also represent a large and mostly unmanaged cost to your business. Recent research found that most organisations are blissfully unaware of the financial costs their printers are racking up, and the environmental cost they are adding to the company's footprint. This is a shame because printers are easily managed and the decision criteria can be easily understood. Printer choices are being driven by the recession and a new environmental awareness - backed up increasingly by regulations. Printer makers are responding to these demands, and the market is moving into a new phase. Users will be choosing to have fewer printers, but larger, more efficient and smarter printers. They may increasingly also choose to buy a print service instead of running and managing all. If you understand the direction of the market, and the specifications of existing printers, and if you can calculate the output you require, you can compare the likely total cost of ownership for a range of models, and find the one that suits your needs best. We hope this guide will help you do that for your company.

Efficiency has now jumped up the list of factors against which IT performance is measured. However, good IT management is still about measurement and control. The total cost of ownership of data centre systems may be calculated differently, but reducing it is a matter of using the right tools and plans. This second guide in the eWEEK Europe series aims to help you meet today's challenges, and find the right path for your data centre.

In the recession, businesses face the challenge of achieving more with less. At the same time, environmental concerns mean that society as a whole must use less power and reduce its carbon emissions. With virtualisation, and newer hardware, the fact is companies can achieve energy savings at the same time as improving the performance of their IT infrastructure and business process. In this How To Guide, eWEEK Europe offers IT departments the freshest information on the subject, and practical advice.