01732 759725 30 NEWS FEATURE As part of the agreement, Vektor Software’s Paul Chadwick has joined CO3 UK as Head of UK Sales, working alongside Account Manager and UK Director Rebecca Earath, who will oversee sales administration and marketing. Although CO3 may be a new name to many UK resellers, the company has been developing software for the print and copy industry for more than 20 years. Its system supports some of the largest print businesses in South Africa, and the partnership brings that expertise directly into the UK channel. CO3’s flagship platform, Nucleus, which is designed for larger organisations will complement Copy Control’s established presence among smaller and mid-sized dealerships. Chadwick pointed out that while the product will be rebranded as Nucleus Go, the core functionality will remain intact. “For existing Copy Control users, the message is simple – nothing changes. Your software, pricing, login details, everything stays exactly the same. “What will change, however, is the scale of support behind the scenes. CO3’s larger technical team will now assist with customer support, offering faster responses, more people who know the software inside out, and the same friendly service you are used to,” he said. Complementary platforms CO3 Technologies CEO Marius Engelbrecht explained how the partnership emerged. “It was quickly obvious to me that Paul and I had two complementary platforms. “Our enterprise-focused system won’t work for smaller businesses where you’ve got people doing multiple roles. There are too many checks and balances in the system that’s structured around having segregation of duties. When we looked at Copy Control, we could see that was exactly what those customers need.” CO3 UK will now offer both Nucleus and Nucleus Go, while the South African operation will expand its portfolio to include Nucleus Go as well. Support and implementation for both products will be handled by CO3’s South African team. “The time zone really lines up with the UK and our first language is English, so we have the ability to support the people in the UK as well,” Engelbrecht said. CO3 plans to align both platforms. “We’re going to do some look and feel work in the coming months, to make both systems look a little bit more similar,” he continued. “If you’re a smaller company, you want everything on one screen; if you’re a bigger company, you only want to see your work on one screen, not everybody else’s work. So that part of the user interface can’t change because we’re going to break the very thing that works. But we’ve used a style of grids in our system, and we will look to adopt a similar style within Nucleus Go.” Pressures facing the print industry Pointing to the fact that the marketplace is vulnerable to external pressures and challenges. Engelbrecht said: “Our role is to equip and enable our customers to utilise their strong customer relationships and service teams to deliver IT, telecoms, IT security and subscriptionbased services alongside managed print services to their customers, to create efficiencies and help our customers operate better than the rest.” He continued: “Paul and I want to be a resource in the marketplace that people can come to for help and advice. One of the reasons we ended up partnering is because our values around people are pretty similar. Both of us view customers as friends, we both personally South African software specialist CO3 is expanding its UK business through a new partnership with Vektor Software (Copy Control), bringing a bigger support team and a broader solutions offering to resellers of all sizes CO3 Technologies and Vektor Software announce UK partnership Marius Engelbrecht Paul Chadwick
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