01732 759725 15 magazine MANAGED SERVICES Longer term we expect there to be a 15% to 20% reduction to pre-Covid print volumes. That is not a massive reduction, but it is a material reduction.” That said, Maruggi does not expect Apogee’s managed print services revenue to decline, but rather to be flat, as the company competes for and wins new contracts and identifies new opportunities in print. “There will be some decline in the print volume and the print fleets of existing accounts, but this will be offset by areas of growth for us, primarily in the public sector. Apogee historically has been under-represented in central and local government but over the last two years we have secured positions on virtually every large public sector framework, giving us an opportunity to grow with public sector entities in a significant way. And there are still growth opportunities in the enterprise space. The majority of these cases go to tender and every time there is a tender process we have an opportunity to present ourselves and to present the new capabilities that we have built within Apogee. “In the SME space, what we call commercial, most growth will come through acquisition.We did an acquisition at the beginning of last year and we may look to make a few acquisitions down the road in order to expand our SMB client base. Organic growth is mostly coming from mid-tolarge corporations and public sector, where our primary competition is from vendors’ direct sales, not other resellers.” Core strengths While Maruggi has confidence in the resilience of Apogee’s core business, he expects managed IT services to be the company’s main engine of growth in the future, thanks in no small part to the strengths the company has developed over its 25 years as a provider of managed print services. “Our company has only two assets: customers and employees.We have in excess of 11,000 clients that we serve every single day with managed print. That is the biggest strength we have, the relationships with those clients and the trust we can build in understanding their customer environment, understanding their journey and helping properly tagged; provide remote monitoring and remote support throughout the device’s lifecycle; provide break and fix services if needed; and, last but not least, provide end of life disposal.We include everything from defining the right device to managing its end of life all in a single contract similar to what we do in managed print services. “This is our starting point in managed IT services, but this year and going forward we will be launching additional services in the areas of security, cloud services and eventually networking services,” he said. Lower print volumes Although Apogee is still in the very early stages of its transformation – print still accounts for more than 90% of revenues – its Outsourced Document Services and Managed IT Services have already proved to be valuable additions to its offering, especially during lockdown when office closures severely disrupted the company’s established managed print services business. “In the darkest days of Covid, overall print volumes of our installed base were 50% to 60% lower than pre-Covid levels, and even now, we are experiencing anywhere between a 25% and 30% reduction in the pre-Covid print volume,” explained Maruggi. “Volumes have dropped significantly because with hybrid working more employees are choosing to spend Tuesday,Wednesday and Thursday in the office, with Mondays and Fridays devoted to flexible or remote working. In addition, digital transformation and more automation have transformed certain processes from a reliance on printed paper to become more digital. them through their transformation. “The second asset is the people associated with the infrastructure we have put in place. Every single day we serve in excess of 150,000 devices distributed across the UK, Ireland and Germany, where we have a small presence.We have a very well distributed workforce that’s able to reach out to any client in a matter of hours and provide what they require – in the past on their printing devices and in the future on any IT device; it could be their desktop, their laptop, their conferencing solution, their servers and so on. That is a significant asset. “Our network, backed up by support from our call centre to our distribution centre, which configures and moves literally thousands of products every quarter, means we are able to deliver a solution to a client, wherever that client is and however many offices they have. And in the hybrid world the number of offices is growing in a more than exponential way because the client can say ‘I want 1,000 PCs and I want 100 delivered to my office and the remaining 900 to be delivered to my employees at their home addresses’.” On this basis, Maruggi says he is positive and confident about Apogee’s ongoing business transformation and the opportunities it presents. “The kind of transformation that we are seeing around us in workplaces is a great opportunity, almost a once in a lifetime opportunity.Where there is transformation, there are problems and risks and people wanting peace of mind.We want to be a trusted partner to our clients so that however big or small the problem they face, we understand it, come up with the right solution and then stand behind that solution. That is our commitment to our clients,” he said. www.apogeecorp.com
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDUxNDM=