MPS Monitor is known for monitoring print fleets at scale. Its director of sales explains why the focus now is on helping dealers act on data, not just collect it.
Ask Mark Kouwenberg, director of sales at MPS Monitor, where the real work of a printer fleet management platform begins, and he says it does not start with features, it starts with the dealer.
“It is about helping dealers with where they really struggle: contract profitability, service optimisation, finding those exceptions,” he says. “That is the major difference between MPS Monitor and the legacy products, the old code bases, the unstable data collectors.”
It is a useful way to frame an industry that has, for years, sold dealers more visibility than they could ever act on. “There is a lot of data, but it lacks direction,” Mark says. “Dealers are overwhelmed with data, but they lack clear priorities.” Data, in other words, was never the destination. It is the direction, and the difference shows in contract margins, in service costs and in the exceptions a dealer manages to catch before they become a problem.
Why this matters now
The timing is not incidental. The economics of managed print services (MPS) have shifted. Service teams are getting smaller while fleets are getting larger, and market consolidation is concentrating more devices under fewer roofs.
“Fewer technicians must support more devices, more accounts and more complexity,” Mark says. The manual, device-by-device workflows that once kept a service operation running simply cannot keep pace with those numbers. It is mathematics, not preference. A dealer cannot hire its way out of a fleet that is growing faster than its headcount, which is why Mark describes the destination plainly: “The future of managed print services is remote first, fully automated and driven on exceptions.”
From monitor to manage
This is the shift at the heart of the platform. Most dashboards are good at one thing and silent on the next. “Dashboards show you what happened, they rarely tell you what to do next,” Mark says.
MPS Monitor’s answer is to combine device intelligence and service intelligence, work by exception, and rank what matters by cost and impact rather than by volume of alerts. In practice that means surfacing contract profitability and coverage so a dealer can see which accounts are quietly losing money. For instance, there is the patented Supplies Intelligence Dashboard, which gives a customisable consumables outlook, so toner and parts are ordered before a device runs dry, not after a service call. Also, there is a Fleet Health Analysis that benchmarks real-world usage against recommended monthly volume for each device, so over-worked and under-used assets are easy to spot.
The common thread is direction. The platform does not just report the exception, it tells the dealer which exception to act on first, and what it will cost to ignore.
What dealers expect, and why they migrate
The contrast with legacy platforms is what makes the case. Older systems often share recurring limitations: dated code bases, less reliable data collectors, infrequent updates, limited support and weaker security. What dealers want instead is straightforward: reliable data, integrations into their ERP and CRM systems, security and compliance they can prove, fast support and a migration that someone else manages for them.
Security has become a differentiator rather than a footnote. “For us, security is about transparency,” Mark says. “Security is actually a sales argument.” MPS Monitor holds ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 2 Type 2 on the product, and CSA STAR Level 2, and the platform is GDPR compliant. Transparency is built into how that is shared: customers can view the certificates in the portal, with the SOC 2 documentation available under NDA. “If we change something on our data collector, it always has an external code review first,” he adds.
Then there is the move itself. Migration is the step dealers dread.
“The pain they live today is permanent,” he says. “The pain of the migration is temporary.” MPS Monitor runs a ‘white glove’ migration: “a dedicated technical manager who supports you every step of the way.”
It is answering a need. “We get migration requests coming in on a daily basis,” he says.
Growth as a consequence
Founded in Italy in 2010, MPS Monitor now monitors over 3 million devices globally for over 4,500 active dealers, with clients in 75+ countries and over 55 billion pages processed every year. The team is around 40 people across several offices, including the UK, and support is offered on a same-day or next-day basis. The business has been growing at 20-30% year on year. The platform supports all makes and models, including Zebra label printers and large format devices.
Mark is careful about the order of cause and effect. Growth is not the pitch. It is what happens when a platform solves the problems dealers actually have: profitability, service and knowing which exception to act on first. The data was never the destination. It only ever pointed the way.
This article first appeared in Print in the Channel magazine issue #38.
