01732 759725 48 Q&A our values, to make sure that we differentiate against another reseller who’s just taking that boiler plate to the customer site. And remember, many customers have had MPS contracts for years, so they have a lot of data. What we need to do is make sure that we’re not just giving them the same as they had the last time and really designing the solution to meet their current requirements. Project complexity is another big thing. The days of rolling in printers, plugging in a print management solution and walking away are gone. Today, you need to be experienced in project management and cloud services and to understand the compliance elements around that. We now interact with every element of a client’s IT system – their security team, the compliance team, the logistics team, health and safety etc. and this all adds to project costs. We have to ensure that the customer is paying for that. I think the power is with ourselves, we need to stop being driven by market or market conditions, be who we are and become better. Q: Which OEMs do you partner with and why? A: We sell 90% Lexmark. We also have a long relationship with Ricoh, but for us, their offering is very specific to certain industries. Lexmark fits well across all sectors and there are lots of reasons why we lead with them. Firstly, they are an engineering company, they build to a really high standard and the devices last. The people are also fantastic, particularly their channel teams, when we ask our account manager a question, they may not have the answer, but they’ll go and get it for you. I guarantee that somebody in Lexmark will give you an answer. They are also really agile and I really like that. In addition, there are advantages in using an OEM’s software set, it aligns with their hardware, their analytics etc., so for us, having a single manufacturer that can provide an enterprise-level cloud service and enterprise-level devices is a real value-add. on what our clients do, but what many companies in the MPS space don’t do, is leverage detailed analytics on contract performance. Contracts are becoming much longer now, running up to seven years, and within that timeframe, the client’s business and their requirements are going to change. So rather than focus on revenue on a monthly or quarterly basis within these accounts, we need to be looking at the data and reacting to that. For example, you could have a fleet of 200 devices, and 2% of that fleet could be dragging your profitability down significantly. But you’re not fixing that until renewal time. So, we need to design flexible contracts that enable us to impose design changes over a period of time so we can ensure that revenues are stable. I think another challenge is around the OEMs’ value propositions. There’s been a lot of consolidation in the manufacturer market, and we see a lot of those ‘value propositions’ becoming much more boilerplate. So as a reseller, we have to take the best strengths of those manufacturers and be more creative in our offerings to the customer. That means designing the solution around Q: What do you see as the biggest challenges facing channel businesses today? A: We need to stop thinking about the challenges driven by manufacturers or markets, and instead really start focusing on our own businesses. By that I mean, how we structure our business to take advantage of innovations such as IoT and AI for example and think about how these technologies relate to our client base. As a reseller, we’ve been monitoring devices for 15 years, in essence working with a (rough) version of IoT and we’ve also always been an annuity focused business. Now you’ll see a lot of the software and managed services companies trying to get into the annuity business, that’s their focus now, but that’s what we’ve always done. As a channel business, we’ve got a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience and we need to really start focusing on that rather than on what the manufacturers and the global market are doing, because that’s changing every day. We also need to be much more proactive around developing proper business analytics within our organisations. We have a lot of visibility John Jones, Commercial Manager, IPSL View from the channel John Jones
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