In an exclusive interview with PrintIT Reseller, Asolvi CEO Nick Barnett, and Head of Business Development Tony Milford, spoke about the roadmap and future plans for its Vantage Online and MySalesDrive products, artificial intelligence, and Asolvi’s priorities for 2024. Here’s an excerpt of the discussion
PrintIT Reseller (PITR): Nick, you recently joined Asolvi as its new CEO and I know you have spent the past few months engaging with customers and spending time on the ground with your colleagues across the UK, Norway, Germany and Spain. Now you’ve got your feet firmly under the table, what are your initial impressions of the industry?
Nick Barnett (NB): I’ve visited eight or nine of our different locations, four or five in the UK, another five or six across our European markets, including Germany, Spain, and the Nordics and
my impression is the business is really exciting. We’ve got so much untapped potential that we can really harness over the next few months Asolvi has a strong position in the sectors in which we operate – the workplace technology sector, but also other sectors like finance, security, utilities and highways across all our main geographies and I see lots of potential and lots of excitement ahead.
PITR: What will be your main priorities for the coming year?
NB: Asolvi is a business that’s grown partly through organic growth, but also largely through acquisition. So as a group, we now have quite a lot of diverse products. We’re now currently working on identifying which ones we want to further invest in and working out how we consolidate our offering, so we have a core product set that really suits our customers’ needs.
PITR: AI has fast become a buzzword, and it seems to be permeating every corner of the technology space. How do you see artificial intelligence impacting your product roadmaps and indeed, the workplace technology channel more widely?
Tony Milford (TM): We’re investigating and utilising various forms of AI across the whole of our business from marketing and sales through to support and operations. In terms of our roadmaps, it will have a significant acceleration effect – on speed of development, on the quality of code with the ability to use AI for enhanced testing and similar sort of technological solutions, which will enable us to do more and more quickly.
PITR: Vantage Online and MySalesDrive combined, offer a powerful proposition to the print channel, in particular the environmental mapping functionality built-in to MySalesDrive. What plans do you have for both products and how do you see your solutions helping resellers and manufacturers navigate an uncertain future?
TM: They are both really great products (as you’d expect me to say!). But they are even better together. Traditionally Asolvi has been mainly in the service and contract management solution space and MySalesDrive was an obvious complementary add on to our services. MySalesDrive is basically set up to make life easier for dealers and distributors, in that they don’t need to have multiple systems that aren’t joined up in order to deliver the services they want to offer.
It also has a really cool set of features that enable dealers to put together proposals that elevate and bring to the fore the positive environmental impacts of print fleet optimisation. Suppliers’ environmental credentials are now right at the top of the list of customers’ selection criteria, and with MySalesDrive’s built-in environmental mapping functionality we can help dealers retain and win more business.
PITR: It’s fair to say that the print market has a number of distinct requirements when it comes down to service management solutions, Asolvi’s solutions are purpose-built to address these, but there are a number of larger blue-chips offering generic ERP-based solutions. What is your take on the specialist versus generalist choice when it comes to selecting an ERP/service and contract management solution?
NB: Obviously, we take a slightly biased view on this because of where we are, but we would certainly advocate that a specialist is always better than a generalist. We are aware of large ERP players building in capabilities and looking at supporting some of the people that we’ve worked with on a daily basis. But we have actually seen quite an interesting reverse of that trend. A number of customers that we’ve worked with for years have taken steps to implement ERP systems as a replacement product, and then have actually come back to us and implemented our solutions because they recognise they fit their needs better.
PITR: The print market is a mature one and a sector which has witnessed much consolidation over the past few years. That said, there appears to be a flux of new entrants, has that been your experience?
TM: Yes, in the past 12-18 months, we have seen around 10 to 12 new businesses perhaps spun out of or launched by people who were previously working for companies that were acquired. Some of that is driven by serial entrepreneurs. Some of it is driven by salespeople who are really good at their job and perhaps not quite as comfortable working in a larger organisation as they were in a smaller, more agile business where perhaps they had a little bit more autonomy.
And I think the other trend is the closure of the gap between workplace technology, managed print and IT. More and more managed print and workplace technology companies have been looking to diversify their offering and move into IT, and that presents opportunities on both sides.
NB: Another trend we’ve witnessed is an acceleration of a ’back to the office’ mentality. And we’re seeing that in the UK as well as across Europe and in the US. As that trend continues, that will create future demand for all elements of workplace technology. So, I think that’s also why we’re seeing more new entrants in the market because they’re now capitalising on that wave of new excitement and new activity across the industry.
