PrintIT Reseller: Which of the products/solutions/services you offer are currently most in demand and why?
Henning Volkmer, President and CEO, Cortado, Inc: ThinPrint and ezeep continue to see a healthy demand across the board as our customers and partners navigate the realities of a post-pandemic world.
More and more customers are moving their IT operations to the cloud and are uncovering new print-related problems along the way. Whether it’s print jobs generated on desktop apps and mobile devices, to backend systems integrated via APIs which don’t deliver print jobs based on user activities but based on system triggers (e.g., ‘new invoice generated’ or ‘new lab result available’), ezeep Blue is perfectly positioned to handle these processes and deliver reliable printing for users and simplified print management for IT staff.
Some of our customers in healthcare, finance, government, or defence, on the other hand, are not (yet) in a position to move to the public cloud but continue to operate on-prem, where our ThinPrint product remains a market leader in simplifying, securing and improving printing from physical and virtual applications, as well as from a wide range of backend applications.
Both product lines can quickly, reliably and securely connect private, public, and on-prem networks to the location of the printer. Their broad feature set includes, for example, enabling secure release printing for any printer and allowing for a zero trust setup of the print environment. Organisations can therefore ensure that users need to authenticate to be able to send and retrieve print jobs, that any administration needs to be authenticated, and printers are securely shielded from other devices and services on individual network segments.
Richard King, Channel Partner Manager (UK & Nordics), iTS: At iTS we are always incredibly careful when selecting solutions for our connected product portfolio to ensure they seamlessly integrate and complement each other. This means that we have a powerful product mix, such as Willow360 (iTS developed document workflow and approval solution), PaperCut (print management) and Umango (document distribution and line-item data extraction solution), that can either collectively, or individually, solve complex requirements.
Mark Ash, CRO, Konica Minolta: Cloud infrastructure and solutions, including print-related solutions; to support and enable businesses with flexibility, scalability, collaboration, improved security and resilience through their IT operations.
Professional print – where we are seeing a big increase in demand is in products that cut the time to produce a job within the print room environment. So whether that’s inline finishing, software automation tools or our IQ quality care system – this is where print room buyers within both the inplant or commercial print sectors see the difference.
Steve Holmes, EMEA & Americas Regional Director & GM, PaperCut: PaperCut MF – our print management software that helps hundreds of millions of people around the globe to minimise waste while enjoying secure and easy printing – remains extremely popular. But as the nature and location of the workplace changes as organisations adopt hybrid working models, we’re seeing increased demand for PaperCut Hive. A highly advanced print management solution, PaperCut Hive is based on an innovative cloud-native platform that provides easy integrations with other services. It helps facilitate the transition to cloud-based print in line with organisations’ broader cloud migration strategies and helps slim down infrastructure requirements, saving costs and simplifying management.
Phil Madders, Managing Director, PAE Business: Device management is still our core offering and our new platform Printanista Hub is in demand – being driven by the superb new DCA and Remote Device Link. The ability to log on to any device internal web pagevia the portal is dramatically reducing support costs for our dealers, and as the upgrade process is very simple, we are very busy moving our customers over to the new platform. Its sister product Printanista Workflow, is gaining ground as offering a leading user management solution to customers who want to simply identify the who, what, why and how of print activity in their organisation. They can have this insight for a nominal cost. The data creates opportunities for more valuable sales and is a great value-add for our dealers, as well as creating a useful recurring revenue stream.
Our new sales automation solution – Cloudquote is flying as it offers a very easy to use platform for delivering accurate and professional quotations, with up to date prices and standard messaging, and tracking the progress through the sales cycle to order processing. It saves so much time and increases the effectiveness and productivity of the sales team, it is a massive and obvious benefit to any organisation involved in sales.
Greig Millar, Chief Revenue Officer, Brother UK: We’re continuing to see strong growth in demand for managed print services. We know that businesses like the hassle-free nature of paying small monthly fees and letting their supplier do the rest. And word on how they can save on their printing and consumable costs by switching to MPS is spreading quickly.
We’re helping our partners to seize this opportunity. Take Printerbase, for example. It recently reported a 50 per cent year-on-year increase in the number of Brother MPS contracts sold in 2022, and the business is expecting a similar increase this year – this opportunity exists for partners across the channel.
Julian Hodges, Head of Product Marketing, Sharp UK: Over the last few years, we’ve seen a rising interest in our Team Room hardware. As new ways of working become engrained in the workplaces of today, organisations need solutions and products to support collaboration for geographically dispersed teams.
In addition, visitor management is also in demand. With office-based and hybrid workplaces, like education, requiring a way to know who is on site at any one time.
When it comes to IT services, software and our MFPs we’re also seeing demand for cloud rather than on-premise. Many organisations are making the shift to the cloud and want all their technology moving forward to facilitate this.
Finally, we’re seeing rising demand from our customers for support with cyber security, particularly around Cyber Essentials and end-user education. As more organisations than ever before operate hybrid working models it’s resulting in more devices and endpoints to protect. It’s key organisations continue to invest in the security of their data with firewall protection, endpoint security, email security and end-user education.
PrintIT Reseller: What do you view as the key trends driving decision-makers’ buying habits and how can channel vendors take advantage of this?
Henning Volkmer: Our customers are navigating an ever-complex world as they move on from the pandemic, face geopolitical realities and economic uncertainties while attempting to keep pace with the trend of digital transformation that hasn’t yet reached top speed. Channel vendors who can offer solutions and guidance are the ones that stand out from the crowd.
Know your customer and their business challenges, put yourself in their shoes, and offer cost-effective, reliable and secure solutions to the challenges you see your customers face. If your customers are still determining where the journey will take them, offer options and guidance, show the flexibility in your solutions, and how these solutions will adapt without incurring extra cost should business parameters or outside factors change.
Look beyond printer hardware, supplies, and traditional add-on options like job volume reporting and understand the overall IT environment that printing has to integrate into, so you can offer solutions that allow an office worker to print a memo as well as enable a laboratory system to print a label in a faraway hospital or connect a newly acquired, cloud-based CRM to the printers at users’ home offices.
Richard King: Recent studies indicate that a cloud-first strategy is extremely high on all decision-makers’ agendas, however it is clear that buyers are seeking advice and guidance from trusted advisors such as iTS which we are happy to assist with.
Tony Milford: Although quality and price remain crucial factors in buyers’ requirements, the importance of sustainability and CSR aspirations as key decision-making drivers is now firmly established on many peoples’ supplier selection criteria.
MySalesDrive’s ability to generate professional, persuasive proposals that effectively communicate not only the technical and financial aspects of the offer but also the energy consumption and positive environmental impacts of the proposed solution immediately reinforces your credibility as a supplier.
By actively demonstrating their ability to support clients’ green aspirations, channel vendors can differentiate themselves and ensure that they are not only winning new business, but also avoiding automatic exclusion from opportunities through under- selling the contribution they can make in this area. By significantly reducing the entire sales process, from assessment and evaluation to optimisation, closure, and review, MySalesDrive not only reduces the time taken to create proposals and TCO analysis, but also positions both the salesperson and the supplier as trusted, skilled advisors dedicated to assisting clients in achieving their overall business goals.
Mark Ash: Digital transformation and innovation to remain competitive, improve business efficiency and enable remote working. Channel vendors can focus on offering cloud solutions that are flexible, scalable and cost-effective. They should also focus on providing excellent customer support, as decision- makers are often looking for partners who can help them navigate the complex world of cloud IT.
The key trends driving decision- makers’ buying habits in professional printing are digitalisation, sustainability, personalisation and automation. Channel vendors should offer solutions that meet these needs, provide optimisation services, and innovate continuously.
Steve Holmes: The pressure points driving decision-making vary according to whether an organisation is in the public or the private sector. If we take education for example, many schools are reporting that, due to inflation and the extreme spike in energy costs, they are having to make decisions between heating or eating; whether they keep teaching spaces warm or children fed. Therefore, investments in IT or AV equipment are getting lower and lower on the priority list. Those schools that were able to invest in secure, sustainable and easy-to-use IT solutions should be able to ride out the current financial and energy crisis.
But, rather than leave them be, this is a great opportunity for channel vendors to engage with those customers and add value by checking whether they are extracting maximum value from
their existing investments; for instance, are they using all of the energy saving functions on a device? If there’s no budget for new IT security solutions, are they maximising their use of the security features built into their print software? In the same vein, are customers on subscription-based plans aware of the features offered by the latest software, or software upgrades? If not, they’re missing the opportunity to extract maximum value from the solutions they’re using. Contacting customers regularly – even if their buying cycle is now out of kilter – will also enable the channel to listen to their customers’ pain points and think about the solutions they can offer their customers when their financial pressures finally ease.
In the private sector, many organisations are implementing strategies to help them achieve
net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, running in parallel with increasingly stringent ESG goals. At the same time as addressing those challenges, they’re battling with rising costs, diminishing demand, the skills crisis and – depending on the sector – ongoing struggles with sourcing raw materials, chips, supply chain bottlenecks and escalating shipping costs. Of course, there’s no silver bullet to those challenges, but there is scope for the channel to work in a consultative capacity with customers to see where technology can help drive process and efficiency improvements as a way of eking out more productivity from employees or processes.
Of course, both private sector and public sector organisations are grappling with the technical, practical and security challenges posed by hybrid working. It is important that print doesn’t slip through the cracks here, given its importance with respect to security, cost, compliance
and sustainability. Organisations need to ensure that they’re providing appropriate print services to their end- users as well as deploying solutions that enable them to track and manage print remotely as effectively as they do from the office.
PaperCut has responded to this requirement with PaperCut MF and PaperCut Hive. While PaperCut MF is well-known for being well suited to on-prem print management, it is also able to operate in a cloud environment. This makes it suitable for private cloud environments, where it has been operating in a number of our customers’ networks in this hybrid configuration for many years now. PaperCut Hive takes a different approach. It uses cloud-based architecture and technology, combined with Edge Mesh technology. Not only does this mean print administration and configuration is easy, but the Edge Mesh also provides users with the ability to keep their printed documents within their local network if they choose.
Phil Madders: Productivity. Everyone is trying to achieve more (or the same) with less. Costs are high, the labour market is tight, so we have to help our dealers and their customers in this journey as they contend with all these different challenges and requirements. The channel vendor can take advantage of this by stepping up as a trusted partner and helping their customers achieve their objectives – be it reducing infrastructure by moving to cloud print or identifying workflows which can be automated and free up people to focus on more valuable activities.
Greig Millar: Buying products and services on subscription is now the norm, whether that’s for groceries or print hardware. The market is moving from sales being predominantly transactional to contractual, and the key challenge for resellers and vendors is keeping pace with customer buying behaviours.
This shift represents an opportunity, not a headache, for the market. There’s a misconception that MPS contracts yield lower margins. But over the lifetime of
a device a reseller will generate larger profits, because guaranteed income from consumables more than makes up for the occasionally lower cost-per-page revenue.
Julian Hodges: Many organisations over the last year have seen increasing costs, that’s why decision-makers are making smarter choices when it comes to their technology. They are looking for technology that can scale with them and has longevity within their workplace.
A cloud-first and serverless approach is a key trend for decision-makers. They are seeking technology solutions that provide integrations with things like Teams such as our new BP-Range.
Although, remote working is common, we’re also seeing a trend in organisations investing in their workplace and technology to entice employees back into the office. They are investing in collaborative AV solutions and reinventing their office spaces with full furniture fitouts. All with improved employee experience in mind.
Finally, decision-makers are putting security first. They are looking for a multi- layered approach to security to provide them with peace of mind that products and solutions are secure. For example, Sharp’s MFPs now have Bitdefender anti- malware technology for added security.
PrintIT Reseller: What in your opinion are the key challenges facing the print and IT channel at the moment and how can you help?
Henning Volkmer: Customers are asking a lot from print and IT channels these days. Going back to what I said in my previous answer, more than ever we see our customers looking not just for cool, one-off tech products but for holistic guidance. Business planning has become more challenging, there are more variables to consider, and many of those are far more volatile than in years past. The print and IT channel are therefore in a position where they have to take the time to learn far more about a customer’s business and objectives and then develop the know-how to dissect the information gathered and turn it into reasonable, cost-effective, and secure options to present to a customer who often doesn’t know what they should assume is going to happen to the business and the environment they are in.
This is a seemingly impossible task. We strive to help our channel partners by offering solutions that streamline, simplify and secure printing but are also flexible and can quickly adapt to new requirements without incurring extra costs.
Moving from on-prem to the cloud or the other way around? Bringing more people back to the office or eliminating space and focusing on working from home? Replacing legacy apps with
new cloud-based web apps? Moving manufacturing operations to a new location? Whatever our customers need to do, our solutions will help customers and the channel partners that support them accomplish these goals with minimal effort and cost, ensuring that whenever printing – in whatever form – is needed, it is delivered flawlessly.
Richard King: What is cloud and what are my options? With years of experience either developing or distributing cloud products iTS is certainly best placed to help navigate through all the jargon and support businesses on their cloud transition journey.
Tony Milford: As a provider of essential operational software solutions for hundreds of channel partners in the UK, Europe, and beyond, we observe a rapidly evolving yet consistently innovative channel striving to stay relevant amid numerous challenges.
Although supply chain issues, industry consolidation, aggressive pricing and general economic stagnation may dominate headlines, the dual threat and opportunity posed by the relentless push for digitisation represent, in my opinion, the most intriguing challenge, particularly for small and medium-sized market players.
We are fortunate to serve clients of all sizes, and by following our customers into the diverse range of additional products and services they now offer their clients, we aim to continue delivering a suite of solutions that enable the print and IT channel to secure more business in the broader workplace technology realm, whilst still maintaining a constant focus on efficiency, productivity, cost-control and exceptional customer service.
Mark Ash: Print can sometimes be an afterthought when a business is starting its journey to cloud infrastructure and modern networks. Often our partners have fantastic experience in print, but less so in cloud and managed infrastructure services. Our expertise can help them with managed print in innovative IT environments and we have some great proof points, such as a recent offering for managed print solutions in Azure and on an SD-WAN Network.
It is not enough to just think about the solution and providing support to the customers’ IT department, more so to also provide the infrastructure to run the solution. IT specialists therefore need to be employed or that expertise needs to be provided by the supplying partner. This also brings in the question of security and although cloud-based solutions are often more secure than on-premise solutions, that expertise is also needed to overcome any hurdles the resellers’ customers may have.
Providing benchmark service to professional print customers can be challenging as the response time expectation is a lot greater than the office world. Konica Minolta can help by offering reliable equipment which is easy to use and can offer a strong partner program to ensure indirect partners are sufficiently trained.
Steve Holmes: Keeping print front- of-mind at the C-level is a challenge, given that the board will be focused on competitiveness, compliance, sustainability, security, adapting to hybrid working models and of course delivering a seamless customer experience. Yet print ties right into those concerns; unsecured print invites the risk of a security breach and a fine under GDPR; unmanaged print won’t help any company lower its print costs or volumes, while print that’s too complex to use – on site or off site – could result in delays sending physical documents to customers or prospects, impacting the customer experience. We help by making print easy; secure and sustainable print needn’t be complex to deploy or manage, so we’ve removed the barriers to adoption that may have prevented organisations from overhauling their print in the past.
At PaperCut, we make sure that print evolves in line with business needs by, for example, helping to support the move to print in the cloud, or hybrid working and hybrid print. We work closely with our partner network to ensure they’re equipped with channel- friendly solutions, training and support to help their customers manage those shifts successfully, thereby bringing their print right up to date; and with that, comes peace of mind from knowing that their print is now secure, efficient and sustainable.
Phil Madders: Could almost be multiple choice with costs up across the board, and prices still on a downward spiral. But I am hearing more and more that finding new people, developing their skills and retaining them seems to be a constant struggle. It is a fundamental challenge, as without good people it is very difficult to grow and develop any business. We can help by offering effective automation tools which reduce the time it takes to do business whether by using the API in our device management product to connect to the service management system, using Cloudquote to increase sales productivity, or Evolved Office to automate the marketing efforts and provide on tap content to promote any business in our space. It is all about achieving more with same resources and our solutions help our customers do that.
Greig Millar: Sustainability is a challenge the industry is tackling as a whole. Rightly, businesses are assessing the potential to cut carbon and boost circularity across their supply chains, and print partners need to be prepared to provide a full breakdown of exactly how consumables are recycled and remanufactured.
With Brother MPS, all used inks and toners are sent for free to our carbon neutral recycling facility in Ruabon, North Wales, with a full report returned to customers on what happens to their consumables. This needs to be standardised across the industry, and quickly, if we’re to meet net zero by 2050
Julian Hodges: There is still uncertainty around supply chain continuity in the sector. In addition to and unsurprisingly, a reduction in customer budgets, particularly for public sector who are looking for products that are reliable and have longevity. This contrasts with corporate and commercial customers who are still looking to invest in their technology to become more efficient and improve employee experience in the workplace.
Finally, we are seeing the need for diversification, offering customers solutions, services and products that support all their workplace technology needs. There’s a requirement for a trusted partner who can support them with technology for new ways of working.
www.ezeep.com
www.its-group.com
www.asolvi.com
www.konicaminolta.co.uk
www.papercut.com
www.paebusiness.com
www.brother.co.uk
www.sharp.co.uk
