Print.IT Reseller - issue 82

ACQUISITIONS 01732 759725 30 Asolvi has acquired perform IT, a move that will see the mySalesDrive.com platform added to its stable of specialist service management solutions. Chief Sales & Marketing Officer Tony Milford, expands on the company’s acquisitive strategy and what this latest deal will mean for the UK channel Asolvi acquires perform IT one example of the value of joining Asolvi is that we have seen a more than doubling of the development and support resource over the last two years. This will enable us to launch Vantage Online in both the Nordics and DACH regions during the course of this year, bringing a modern, specialist, hosted cloud solution to dealers and distributors who need to be able to work from anywhere whilst delivering an ever-expanding range of products and services to their clients. Our ambition is to do the same with mySalesDrive. MR: What impact will the addition of mySalesDrive.com have on the business and why should UK channel vendors be looking to partner with you? TM: It represents a slight pivoting of our previous approach, but a natural evolution nonetheless. Both businesses have huge experience in the MPS and workplace technology markets. Indeed, we share many existing customers. With the acquisition and integration of both Purpose Software and Vantage Computing into the Asolvi family, we are proud to supply solutions to over 300 clients in the UK alone. The UK is a key market for Asolvi, not just in MPS, but also in the fire and security sector with Alarm Master and the foodservice equipment industry with Tesseract. We employ almost 70 people in the UK, with more than 40 colleagues at our UK Head Office in High Wycombe and additional dedicated specialists in our Hertfordshire, Nottingham and Hull locations. That team is there to develop, deploy and support solutions that are aiming to simplify service management for clients and to help people do more with less. For businesses that are looking to navigate these fast-changing times and evolve their businesses to thrive, rather than just survive, Asolvi has not just the products to support this, but also the cumulative knowledge and experience of best practice to be much more than just a transactional supplier of software. MR: What’s the value-add to existing customers of both companies? How will the platforms complement each other, and are there plans for deeper integration between them? TM: Just like Armin and his team at perform IT, we have ambitious plans for mySalesDrive. With Vantage Online and Evatic, we have two of the most flexible, industry-specific service and contract management solutions available anywhere in the world. Throw in mySalesDrive to help dealers to win more deals and optimise their sales processes and you can see why the fit is a natural one. There certainly are plans for integration, but we want to ensure that this is done in consultation with our customers and in an order that delivers most value to our respective clients. As such we will take a bit of time to canvas opinions and also to evaluate where we might be able to add additional functionality to ensure that, in this case, one and one makes more than two. All of our solutions for the channel are more than capable of standing on their own, as they have already proven. Together, though, we believe they have the potential to deliver even more. MR: Are there other acquisitions in the pipeline? TM: Absolutely. There are ongoing conversations with a number of very interesting solution providers and I doubt very much that this will be the last announcement we make in 2021. www.asolvi.com Michelle Ryder (MR): The perform IT acquisition is Asolvi’s seventh in the last five years. What is the company’s growth strategy and how does an acquisitive business model support that, for example, what have you achieved following the integration of Vantage Online? Tony Milford (TM): Asolvi strongly believes that in most situations, a specialist will always deliver more value than a generalist. As such, we focus on delivering value to markets where we have deep domain knowledge and where the collective needs of the market can help us drive innovation and change. We are proud to support hundreds of managed print and workplace technology clients across Europe and the wider EMEA region, and the recent acquisition of mySalesDrive is a perfect example of that focus on specialism. Businesses need more than ever to be able to do more with less and the ability to deliver more of their services via integrated solutions has obvious benefits compared to working with a multitude of disconnected systems. In mySalesDrive, we have what we believe is the most promising sales optimisation tool available to the channel, but, as was the case with my own business Vantage, it is largely focussed on a specific geography and faced challenges in achieving the scale required to both invest in future technologies and to extend its existing reach. In the case of Vantage Online, just Tony Milford The UK is a key market for Asolvi, not just in MPS, but also in the fire and security sector with Alarm Master and the foodservice equipment industry with Tesseract