Print.IT Reseller - issue 79

PRINTITRESELLER.UK 23 OPINION the upheaval most organisations have faced this year, they will be looking to be able to react quickly to their normal workplace or market being disrupted through a lockdown or restriction. They will look for agreements where they can switch off or reduce costs temporarily to deal with cashflow or capacity fluctuations. This will challenge the creativity of the channel, but I am already seeing flexible (short) terms being offered on hardware, and dealers using SaaS models to build in the ability to respond to a change in circumstances for their customers. The second challenge is how to remunerate the sales person.” PAE Business has been working with true SaaS pricing since 2012. Its user management software can be supplied on a month to month basis, deactivated in one customer and moved to another at any time without penalty to the dealer or the customer, if the dealer agrees. It is not tied to Mac address or limited by the number of activations. Madders says this is the ideal model for this market. “The major discussion we always have when a dealer first embarks on building a recurring revenue, is how do we pay a salesperson? It cannot be on a share of profit if you are renting a piece of hardware for a short term. “It could be on contract value – but if it is a short-term rental then the contract value will be lower so you need many more to make the commission attractive to potential recruits, and it takes time to build. The other question is the type of skills required to sell a recurring revenue offering maybe different to the more traditional sales approach. These are just some of the challenges faced by our channel in 2021, he said. Innovation 2020 has been a real challenge in the business world and on the back of this key innovations like the Fever Detect devices have assisted both employees and visitors to get back on with the new normal. Simon Chapman, Managing Director, Fever Detect said that the company will continue to modify its offering to keep assisting staff and visitors to get back to their offices and feel safe, productive and most importantly to do more business. “Going forward as more venues reopen and events and larger gatherings begin to be allowed, Fever Detect will look to offer the Premium Print Model, that can quickly take an individual’s temperature, capture facial recognition via its software and print a sticker to confirm that a person has normal temperature upon entry,” he said. www.weareintuitive.com www.ecisolutions.com www.papercut.com www.paebusiness.com www.feverdetect.co.uk consultancy service to their customers. It provided measurements for safe spaces, and visualisation of sanitising stations and one way systems. It was launched within 12 weeks of lockdown and ready to use just when companies needed it. It proves the old adage where there is challenge there is opportunity.” Speaking to the opportunities in 2021, Madders said: “The office space is changing – there will more flexibility about where people work. Work reliance on cloud-based solutions and after years of centralising print, there will be a move to decentralising print as the shared office facility be it a coffee machine or an MFP will be less popular. This will be achieved by audits reversing years of consolidation on centrally placed devices to printers in bubbles – by team or department. What will not change is the desire to manage the expanded fleet centrally so MPS will still be centre stage, and cost per page will still be the favoured method of billing.” Madders says that data management will be even more critical and accessing it from wherever you need it, will be paramount in most organisations’ thinking. “Analytics and dashboarding will move into most products as a core piece which in turn will drive organisations in one of two directions. They will either need to engage in one all-encompassing suite of products, which covers all aspects of their business and has central reporting, or adopt their current infrastructure by positioning a dashboard layer across the organisation which pulls information from the different data silos and combines it one company- wide dashboard. We are working on several projects with the second approach as companies are reluctant to bin everything at once. This is also an opportunity for our channel as dealers can deliver this service to their customers. All this will be delivered to a marketplace that will require greater flexibility and innovation from their suppliers and that will bring new challenges to the channel,” he explained. Moving onto challenges, Madders said: “The pandemic will be written about everywhere so I will acknowledge it as a challenge, but leave it to others better qualified than me to deal with it. The challenges for a channel specifically related to the new marketplace that I see are twofold. The first is delivering new flexibility to supply agreements – be it an MFP or a software solution, given Simon Chapman Phil Madders They will look for agreements where they can switch off or reduce costs temporarily to deal with cashflow or capacity fluctuations