01732 759725 48 Q&A a place for print, and in particular, cloud-based print management, we have in fact just won a significant UK‑wide contract for managed print for a global organisation. Q: When selling MFPs, what are the most popular software solutions you provide and why? A: We provide Ricoh’s proprietary cloud solutions naturally as they work really well with Ricoh devices. We also work with PaperCut and Y Soft. There are huge advantages to migrating to cloud‑based print management in terms of no on-premise infrastructure, automatic updates and in-built security so that’s always my preferred go-to solution, but again it does depend on individual customer requirements. Q: If you could change one aspect of your job, what would it be and why? A: I do actually love my job and I really enjoy what I’m doing. The only thing is, I’m always on – even on holiday I was taking meetings, so the one thing I would change is learning how to switch off! Q: How do you spend your week – time on phone, face to face meetings with customers etc.? A: A typical week would see me spending about half my time on Teams calls, I used to rail against remote meetings but they really are an efficient use of time, I’m based in Glasgow but I serve customers across the UK. That said, face-to-face is still really important and probably 30% of my week is spent out and about in front of customers, at networking events or similar. Q: What would make your job easier? A: An unlimited marketing budget and more hours in the day! www.streammanagedservices.co.uk ensure our offering supports all of our customers’ changing needs. Q: Which OEMs do you partner with and why? A: On the hardware side, we partner with Ricoh. I’ve worked with a number of OEM partners over the years, and when I set up Stream Managed Services, I wanted to work with a premium brand and Ricoh ticked all of the boxes in terms of quality of product, reputation and green credentials. Their ownership of DocuWare was also key, I first saw the product about eight years ago and it’s absolutely incredible. My relationship with them is excellent. We also partner with Intuitive and leverage their dashboards for print and process management. Q: What are your customers most interested in currently? A: Every business has concerns over security, mitigating risk and compliance to things like the GDPR. As a services provider, we make sure that we ask all the right questions around what’s important to the customer, and bring things to the table that support compliance, reduce risk and enhance document security. Automating processes is another key area, eliminating manual repetitive tasks, making things faster and quicker in areas such as accounts payable or HR for example. Q: How have you changed/are you changing business operations to exploit new opportunities? A: We were ahead of the game in terms of digitalisation. As far back as 20 years ago, it wasn’t rocket science that people would want to digitise their processes and information and that print at some point would be become less and less important. The data that people were printing hasn’t gone away, it’s just in a different format, which is now digital. So, I pivoted and really threw myself into how businesses manage their data and their information, and that includes print as well. There’s still very much Q: What do you see as the biggest challenges facing channel businesses today? A: People are printing much less than they used to and with lots of people still working from home, businesses have lost a little bit of control over information management and the print environment. Home and remote workers need to be able to seamlessly access the information and the tools they need to do their job, and that’s our sweet spot, streamlining and simplifying how information is managed through the suite of document management products that we offer. As a channel business, we have to stay ahead and View from the channel Steve Young, Managing Director, Stream Managed Services Steve Young
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