PRINTITRESELLER.UK 37 Michelle Ryder spoke to Michael Lloyd, CEO at Nuvola Distribution about unified communications, cloud and video audio conferencing, and the opportunity for print and IT resellers to expand share of wallet and provide customers with a fully integrated IT offering with Europe. We also conduct a lot of business where the product comes from America and goes straight to Europe, so having a presence in Ireland makes life a lot easier. MR: How has COVID impacted the business and team and has it changed your go-to-market strategy? ML: In the UCaaS world there was talk about the cloud about eight years ago, but the pandemic accelerated its adoption probably by five to ten years. Face-to-face meetings were by necessity replaced with video calls, and what we have seen is an appetite within the traditional print and IT channel to take on something new. We found a number of print resellers talking to their customers about voice and data. It’s a natural fit for this channel, they have built strong customer relationships, they are used to completing multi-year deals, recurring revenue, etc. To some extent there is still some hesitancy among print specialists saying: “let's talk about UCaaS” because it's out of their comfort zone. But there are a number of customers out there who are interested and it’s not a big stretch to take it on and add a new service to their monthly bill. The challenge perhaps is a change in mind-set and maybe that will come as the next generation take the helm? There’s also questions around commission, gross profit etc. So, there’s still a bit of education to be done. What we try to do as a value-added distributor is to support in a consultative role. In the print world, there is no one-sizefits-all solution, and that's very much the same in the cloud. Feature-sets differ, as do customers’ requirements and our job is to support and consult in delivering the right solution. Partners keep talking to their customers and own the relationships, they don’t have to invest in training or upskilling their sales teams, we do the heavy lifting, and ultimately that means partners can onboard very quickly. MR: What would you say are the biggest challenges for vendors at the moment? ML: We are operating in a busy, congested market and differentiating is difficult for vendors. We all know that trying to compete on price is a route to nowhere. It’ll be how cheap can you do? And then the business owners will question whether or not it will increase the bottom line. And when you're trying to encourage new partners along, the margin opportunity is key. The challenge is to differentiate in the quality of the product, while also ensuring that everyone can make some money along the way. Michelle Ryder (MR): Tell me a little bit about Nuvola Distribution. Michael Lloyd (ML): We started out as a white-label professional services business serving the comms world, that was 12 years ago. We would typically subcontract our engineers to resellers and they would sell white-label services around some of the traditional UC products that dealers hadn’t been able to offer in the past because they didn’t necessarily have the skill-set. Then about nine years ago, we were approached to take on distribution for a number of our vendors. At that time there weren’t many specialist valueadded distributors in the sector and our partners were looking for a full service that went beyond traditional box shifting. We rebranded as Nuvola Distribution and we now offer a wide range of communications solutions from desktop handsets, all the way to full network monitoring solutions and everything in between. We also have an office, warehousing facility and staff in Galway, Ireland. We set the company up before Brexit which means that we can trade seamlessly Q&A with Michael Lloyd Q&A continued... Michael Lloyd
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