Print.IT Reseller - issue 57

01732 759725 38 VOX POP Joe Doyle, Group Marketing Director, KYOCERA : “The need to diversify is a key element to remain innovative and sustainable within the market. Adapting to the demand of businesses, staying influential and present within the market is a major factor to provide ‘services beyond MPS’. For instance, our acquisition of Annodata last year provided us with a platform beyond managed print and into IT services – helping us to expand and diversify. “It’s a trend in the marketplace currently for companies, particularly in the enterprise and large public sector space, to adopt a ‘many to few vendor’ strategy. Companies want to rationalise their suppliers creating economies of scale and build deeper, more strategic relationships.” DISTRIBUTION Jamie Brothwell, General Manager Print, Exertis : “This is an interesting topic. Distribution has clearly evolved its offering beyond pick, pack and ship. We have increased our services proposition as a business and are experiencing a huge uptake in core areas including enterprise. “It’s important that we enhance and continue to add to our service proposition if we are to remain relevant in an ever competitive landscape. We have worked hard to develop our print service offering which includes a number of basic chargeable services including: asset tagging, basic network set-up, pre-shipment PDI, legacy equipment collection and disposal. Our strategy is to offer complementary services to our customers and to enable dealers to upscale their operation, as and when they require, with the added benefit of a non-compete perspective. We would love to discuss this more with our partners as opportunities arise.” Jonathan Whitworth, Managing Director, DSales : “As a vendor, Develop provides the hardware and software solutions necessary for our channel partners to offer customers a diverse portfolio of products for their business needs, for example many of our most successful partners are already offering network services, software development and other IT services.” SOLUTION PROVIDERS John Gifford, Founder & Managing Director, Fiducia Strategic Consultancy : “Because we are not a traditional reseller and instead are a 100 per cent services-orientated business by way of strategic and operational consultancy to the channel and end-user clients, we are constantly advocating the need and benefits of ‘services beyond MPS’, be it in consultation with channel partners or end-users. “MPS in its traditional format of hardware supply and consumable supply, even if automated and pro-active, is not enough for future survival. Offering things like implementation services and the hugely commoditised ‘pull print’ solutions are not going to be enough in the longer term either. Understanding and building a strategy that gears a channel business into offering more advanced services is critical from our point of view. Many people talk about integrating MPS with IT Managed Services in IT VAR environments, and this is definitely a positive option and should be explored thoroughly, but it’s not the only option. There are many other ways to diversify and provide alternative, value-added services to clients depending on the make-up of the channel partner, but it takes some creative thinking and a thorough mapping of clients, markets, and many other factors, to then build a roadmap for change that can achieve the ROI that partners need for future growth.” ...continued Elia Giovanni Shaun Wilkinson Jamie Brothwell Distribution has clearly evolved its offering beyond pick, pack and ship