Business Info - issue 139

24 | P2P Magazine 01732 759725 businessinfomag.uk magazine 10 PRINT At the end of last year, Xerox won the Keypoint Intelligence – Buyers Lab Document Imaging Software Line of the Year award for the fifth time, thanks in part to the strength of its app development programme and online app marketplace. With the Xerox App Gallery, Xerox is hoping to do for ConnectKey-enabled print devices what the App Store did for smartphones, turning them into ‘workplace assistants’ in the same way that apps have turned smartphones into quasi ‘personal assistants’. Today, there are 32 apps in the public gallery that users can install on Xerox devices, including workflow tools, connectors to popular cloud storage and enterprise applications (see box) and productivity aids like translation and text-to-audio conversion apps. The partner Gallery gives channel partners access to many more apps developed and marketed by Xerox and some of the 400 plus partners enrolled on the company’s Personal Application Builder (PAB) programme (PAB partners also develop customer-specific apps not for resale). Find it, map it, app it Xerox has made the PAB programme a key part of its growth strategy and is encouraging resellers to enrol in it and use associated tools like the Xerox Workflow Mapping tool to change their relationships with customers, differentiate themselves and generate additional revenue from software. “We had been launching a solution as if it was just another product – here’s the next thing, learn this, go and have this conversation with the customer,” explained Mark Boyt, Global Head of Solutions Marketing. “We decided we had to do a lot more to help partners sell software, to help them have the right conversations with customers. That’s how we came up with theWorkflow Mapping Tool and the Easy Translator and Audio Documents apps,” he said. “One of the things we have discovered is that you can have a conversation with a customer to identify a problem they need help with, but sometimes the customer is resistant and is not ready to share. You have to build a relationship first before the conversation can get going. Things like Easy Translator can open doors and break down barriers, because the customer just goes ‘Wow’.” Once a door has been opened in this way, says Boyt, organisations are more likely to talk about inefficiencies they might have in their processes, which a reseller can then propose an app-based solution for, mapped out using the Workflow Mapping Tool and built with PAB tools. A process Xerox encapsulates in the slogan ‘Find it, Map it, App it’. Food for thought For a real-world example of this approach, Boyt cites the case of EtiQube, a Xerox concessionnaire based in Milan that has developed more than 30 apps for customers. One of these is Meal-IT, a food ordering app that CEO Alberto Raimondi created following an on-site MFP audit. His contact invited him to lunch in the staff canteen, but every dish Raimondi selected was unavailable because he hadn’t ordered it before the deadline of 10am. The next day, he was determined to put his lunch order in on time. Along with hundreds of others, he joined a long queue at the only terminal for this purpose – which promptly broke down. Seizing the initiative, Raimondo pitched the idea of a meal-ordering app that could be installed on 15 MFPs, saving employees queueing time and building resilience into the system. “This example follows the ‘find it, map it, app it’ approach exactly,” explained Boyt. “Raimondi found the problem – people weren’t eating lunch because they hadn’t ordered their food by 10 o’clock; he understood how it needed to work; he mapped it; and he built it.” End user value The ability to solve customer problems in this way has become a key revenue generator for PAB partners. In the last four years, JustTech, the first certified PAB app developer in the US, has installed 40,000 apps on Xerox ConnectKey MFPs, bringing in more than $1.2 million in licensing fees from other partners, and much more from sales to its own customer base. JustTech founder Joshua Justice adds that apps have also been instrumental in Xerox and its partners are changing the conversations they have with customers. James Goulding reports