Neither Down Nor Out

"We see customers merging traditional in-plant and data center functions," he says. "They are finding that transactional printing can be done easily in the in-plant, and other historically data center print functions, such as report printing, can be done by the work group."

Kern predicts that production printer speed and quality will continue to improve, as will the system architecture that enables in-plant managers to route jobs to different printers.