technologyreseller.co.uk Q&A 25 With Aurelio Maruggi, Chief Executive Officer, Apogee of certain trends, such as accelerated digital adoption and digital transformation, accelerated investment in security and, last but not least, managing a workforce that became, for an extended period of time, completely remote and is now hybrid but still way more challenging to engage. At the onset of the pandemic we realised that work wasn’t going to be the same and that there was an opportunity for us to continue to provide clients with what I like to describe as the single thing that Apogee delivers, peace of mind. We realised there was an opportunity to provide peace of mind beyond print – to understand the customer’s environment; to understand the journey they are on, be it towards digital transformation or more automation; to provide a range of possible solutions that the client can rely on to drive that digital transformation; and, even more importantly, to support those solutions with hardware or software that we are able to put together, configure, deliver to the client and support throughout its lifecycle. TR: What are some of the additional services that Apogee is now offering? AM: We have three categories of service. One is Managed Print Services. The second category is what we call Outsourced Document Services, where we produce medium to high volume print on behalf of customers at our two production centres, one in the City and one close to Manchester, supported by our own delivery services. In March to May 2020, to meet customer demand, we added scanning services to our Outsourced Document Services, including inbound mail. During the pandemic, a lot of clients redirected their physical mail to our production centres, where we open the envelope, check the contents and scan documents to a cloud-based repository or to an employee for processing. We also have a hybrid mail service, which was particularly valuable during COVID and still is for hybrid workers. Hybrid mail gives every worker the equivalent of a printer driver on their desktop or laptop that enables them to send a document to one of our production centres for printing, along with the address and type of postage required. There, it is professionally printed, put in an envelope, franked and delivered to the addressee, saving a lot of time and hassle for hybrid workers who no longer have access to a franking machine. Our document services business has been experiencing double-digit growth and we expect it to continue to grow steadily. A lot of medium to large companies in our customer base still have internal reprographic centres where they do high volume production printing and more and more of them are keen to outsource that work and redeploy the resources and investment from their reprographic centre to IT or other parts of the organisation. The third area is what we call Managed IT Services. This covers a very broad spectrum of technologies and services and the approach we are taking is not to boil the ocean all at once but to identify areas of IT that have closer adjacencies to the services that we already provide in managed print. At the beginning of last year, we started providing device-specific services to our The last two years have underlined the importance of diversification for generating additional revenue and maintaining relevance with customers. Managed print services provider Apogee, which was acquired by HP in 2018, had started down this road before the pandemic struck, and has been accelerating its transition into a managed IT services provider ever since. As CEO Aurelio Maruggi told Technology Reseller, this is not an instant transformation but an ongoing journey, where the biggest challenge is often not identifying new opportunities but reining in the enthusiasm of Apogee’s sales teams and customers. Of course, many IT and telecoms resellers are undergoing a similar transition and adding managed print services to their portfolios. The good news for them is that there is still growth in the print market, if you know where to look. Technology Reseller (TR): Like many managed print service providers Apogee is evolving into more of a managed IT services provider. When did you start this process and how advanced is it? Aurelio Maruggi (AM): The very first thing to make clear is that this is a journey, and we embarked on it as a successful provider of managed print services to quite a large client base – we have in excess of 11,000 clients that we have been serving for almost 25 years since the first nucleus of Apogee was founded. Two years ago, we started an accelerated journey to evolve Apogee from being just a managed print services provider to becoming a services provider with a significantly larger portfolio of services for our client base. This was driven by the realisation that a lot of the capabilities and infrastructure that we have built for managed print services could be used for the delivery of other services, combined with recognition of the major changes that have taken place because of the pandemic. Someone said that the last two years have been like two dog years in terms Q&A Aurelio Maruggi continued...
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