25 Years of PAE Business
25 years ago, today I incorporated as DWS, and began a journey in Print Management that saw us evolve into Print Audit Europe and PAE Business sees us celebrating our 25th anniversary today.
Also launched in 2000 were the PlayStation 2, USB drives, MP3 players although the IPOD had not arrived. We were still waiting on Windows XP and the precursor to WIFI – WAP was starting to emerge. Phones were still phones and Music sharing was Napster or LimeWire which both failed due to copyright issues. To pass the time I would sometimes play Snake on my Nokia 3310. I still had a road atlas in the car as GPS was launched for civilians in 2000 but, they were a select bunch who I guess could afford a separate console in their car as I had never actually met anyone using it, and it was another 7 years before I saw it on a mobile phone. Videos Cassettes were still available, but DVD was starting to replace them, but Blockbuster still ruled the home entertainment space if you wanted to watch a movie at home.
It is difficult to summarise 25 years into a concise blog, but it has been an amazing experience to work within the Office Equipment channel – to launch the first completely hosted device management platform in Europe in 2005 (all our competitors were on Premise), the first SAAS programme to include user management – the Premier programme in 2012, our very own BI platform in PAE BI. We have shared the ups as the market for colour surged and devices became digital hubs, to the downs of the financial crash of 2008 and the darkest of times during the Pandemic when our partners were logging into the Print Audit FM to see if anyone had printed that day/week/month.
I am very proud of the partnerships we have built with OEMs – notably Ricoh, and Toshiba who have worked with us since 2005, our distribution network across Europe with Katun, Mastertec in Spain, Pierro Basso in Italy, It Naledi in South Africa and PA France and Offscript Germany. Looking at the system today our oldest continuous dealers are from 2007. There are some dealers who have been with us since we sold Print Audit Assessor in 2002 and still use our solutions and services but have grown through acquisition and mergers to be different entities.
I still remember introducing remote device management to organisations way back in 2005 to replace postcards the customer sent in or the team of people ringing customers to request the meter reading for billing and the endless cycle of estimates. All that finished for our dealers with Print Audit FM as we stated on the journey to Managed Print Services being a deliverable.
We have achieved some mind-blowing figures. In 2019 alone we tracked and reported on approximately 12,634,143,332.00 pages. That is a such a large number I had to ask Google and found that it is over 12 trillion pages. Allowing for a penny a page that is £126,341,433 generated in the channel. We have over 500 dealers and have had so for 20 or so years, so if you extrapolate that out the numbers are mind boggling. Our DCAs are being hosted in 80,000 separate locations and close 67000 organisations across EMEA and we have over 400,000 active licenses.
We are very proud of our contribution to the channel and the success of our customers. Stating the obvious we wouldn’t be here without you – so thank you to each one of you. The thing I have had most satisfaction with during the last quarter of a century is the people I have met, the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of individuals and the sheer energy of the channel that has overcome Financial Crashes, a Pandemic, Austerity and a pace of change that constantly throws up challenges to be overcome.
We are looking forward to the next 25 years continually building on our successful partnership with ECI and exciting new solutions in our portfolio – Cloud Quote and Dynamic Connect.
Thank all very much to you all.
Phil Madders, Managing Director – PAE Business Ltd
About PAE Business
Established in 2000, PAE Business is a prominent solutions and services provider in the Managed Print Services (MPS) and Managed Content Services (MCS) sectors. Based in the UK, PAE operates across the EMEA region and collaborates with market-leading, award-winning partners to deliver tailored solutions that provide resellers with a distinct competitive advantage to win more business
