PrintIT Reseller - issue 64

01732 759725 32 CONFERENCE SYNAXON UK outlined its future investment and development plans at its 2019 Member Conference, which took place at Jury’s Inn, Hinckley last month SYNAXON UK looks to new horizons A new start In his keynote address, Roebers told members: “For the past decade, our approach has been to develop services exclusively for the UK market. One reason for that was that we were transforming our business model in Germany from being product-focused to services-focused. We’ve now completed that process and over the past five years we have made SYNAXON a real success story in Germany. We are now to invest a whole lot of energy and money into SYNAXON UK, so that we reach the same level of performance here as we have in Germany. We are kicking off a completely ‘new start’ in the UK.” That investment has already seen SYNAXON UK recruit additional staff to provide added support to members and over the next few months, more people will be added to the team as the UK operation looks to mirror the group’s meteoric rise in its home country. New initiatives, such as the SynMSP and iTeam communities, and the SYNAXON Academy, which provides specialist training for members, have already been launched in the UK and all of these programmes are being expanded. The Central Trading scheme, which will provide preferential pricing on a whole range of products from leading vendors, is also up and running in the UK, and this will be expanded massively over the coming year. Other services, such as SYNAXON Managed Services (SMS), which will provide a whole raft of options members can offer to their customers, will be launched later this year. SYNAXON also operates a highly- effective marketing programme in Germany and it’s planning to emulate that in the UK market as well. Other changes will be more immediate. This month (July), all current members will be transitioning to the membership status that of SYNAXON IT Partner. This won’t be very different to their current enrolment but will bring additional benefits in the form of access to the new services and the additional support of the new starters. Exciting times Mike Barron, Channel Director at SYNAXON UK, said the whole team will be working hard to make sure that members reap the rewards of the changes. “These are exciting times for everyone involved with SYNAXON UK. It really is a new start – but one that preserves what’s been so good about Established in the UK 11 years ago, SYNAXON has undoubtedly been a big success story. The channel services group now has over 600 members and more than 50 supplier partners that work together to try and identify and develop new areas of opportunity in the market, as well as provide a whole range of business benefits, including access to the EGIS procurement platform and special terms and conditions from supplier partners. That said, SYNAXON UK has some work to do to get to the same heights as in its home country, Germany. Over there the group is simply huge, with more than 3,000 members and 200 staff and offering a wide range of services and support. The EGIS procurement platform provides real-time aggregation for 80 distributors in Germany and SYNAXON’s marketing activities generate a significant volume of links and leads for members every month. While he acknowledged that there are clear differences between the two markets, Frank Roebers, CEO of SYNAXON AG, feels that the UK operation can go much further and he came to this year’s conference which was themed ‘New Horizons’ to outline the group’s plans to make a ‘new start’ in the UK and outline the massive investment programme that the group is now rolling out here. We are now to invest a whole lot of energy and money into SYNAXON UK, so that we reach the same level of performance here as we have in Germany