Organisations are at different points on their cloud journey and it’s fair to say that it’s certainly not a case of all or nothing for the majority
PrintIT Reseller: Through 2025, Gartner says that organisations will increase their reliance on external consultants, as the greater urgency and accelerated pace of change widen the gap between organisations’ digital business ambitions and their internal resources and capabilities. The analyst house expects most large organisations to use external consultants to develop their cloud strategy over the next few years – which presents opportunity for print and IT channel players to leverage their trusted partner status and help customers and prospects modernise legacy print infrastructures. How are you helping your channel partners to capitalise on the opportunity to deliver dedicated cloud print management services?
David Jenkins, CEO, directprint.io: “We are a young and very agile company, our team including me, are all easy to deal with and we make our diaries available via Calendly so it’s easy to book a call with us. Our partners’ success is our success and we work really hard to help them market and sell directprint.io. We’re committed to helping our partners to grow their business in the cloud and we can promise to provide technical support that’s second to none!
“The past few years has seen us partner with OEMs, resellers, VARs, print vendors, SaaS and IT services providers. Many of our partners are headquartered in the US and have a global footprint, but we’re now proactively seeking to forge new partnerships within the UK channel.
“If we revisit the barriers to adoption I referred to last issue, first of all, our serverless solution is robust, featurerich and supports all user environments. We support organisations that use Chromebooks, macOS or Windows, or even an amalgamation of the three. Our platform supports all major print manufacturers – and our unique universal driver includes advanced finishing options for over 5,000 printer makes and models, making it ideal for customers with multi-vendor fleets.
“We also provide a well-defined migration path from legacy systems; we avoid big bang deployments – our adoption cycle is easy and pain-free for IT and it goes without saying that we provide full support during that process. The enduser experience is seamless and they can print the way they have always done.
“Our pricing is also clear, transparent and cost-effective, directprint.io costs around £3-4 per user per year. We also make it easy for partners to prove the RoI, via a handy calculator on our website.
“We’re also well-positioned to support partners in winning new business. The directprint.io partner portal enables them to register leads and gain insight into their lead’s interaction with directprint.io. Partners can track information such as trial generation, last login, number of prints in the last seven days, and any quotes that have been generated for example. They can also extend trials or even convert trials into licensed customers from the portal. In essence, it gives our partners complete control and authority over all accounts and leads that they have with us.
“directprint.io was originally designed to support Google Workspace and Chrome OS environments, and as a result we have a strong presence in the education sector and count some of the biggest school districts in the US among our client base. That’s a strong proposition for resellers looking to win in this vertical. This past twelve months we have expanded our support into the Microsoft ecosystem and there is now true parity in our offering. We also support POS and label printers which opens new recurring revenue potential with retail, warehousing and logistics operations for example.” www.directprint.io
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Andrew Smith, Chief Information and Strategy Officer, Kyocera: “The IT sector is growing at pace, and this has further accelerated since COVID-19. We believe that a successful channel partnership includes resourcing our partners with the skills, products and capabilities to successfully resolve their customers’ challenges. With a wide range of competition, traditional approaches no longer provide the means for channel partners to differentiate. Therefore, Kyocera is focusing on the following areas to deliver unique value to its channel partners.
“Infrastructure investment – Kyocera is investing an unprecedented amount in its back-office infrastructure, implementing world-leading platforms, services and shared service models that give our partners the confidence and backing to meet their customer needs.
“Market presence – we are pivoting into the digital transformation arena to provide thought leadership and direction to improve our brand presence, but also assist with credibility in partnership and customer engagements.
“Value propositions – we are investing in creating unique value propositions in a quick and agile approach, to enable our partners to remain relevant in the marketplace.
“Partnerships – we are reviewing how we partner with leading vendors to enhance our propositions and remain relevant to today’s requirements.
“Enablement – we are building an enablement engine to ensure that partners are trained and have the right resources and support around them to succeed.
“The ability for specialist partners to add value to customers’ varied landscapes is growing, and we believe that our approach and development will further strengthen our partnerships in the channel.” kyoceradocumentsolutions.co.uk
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Henning Volkmer, President & CEO, ThinPrint Inc: “ezeep has long offered a lucrative, easy to manage partner program that automatically pays a substantial partner reward for every transaction a partner’s customer has though ezeep. From the initial deal, to the renewals, to increases in user numbers or plan upgrades, ezeep’s partner program ensures that our channel partners are rewarded for their work.
“ezeep’s teams can back up a channel partner’s team or be directly involved with a customer. While the primary contact for a customer is always a partner’s team, channel partners can rely on ezeep’s support during design, roll-out and operation of a project through ezeep’s professional services and support teams.” www.thin print.com
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Steve Holmes, EMEA Regional Director, PaperCut: “Our channel partners are familiar with the benefits of cloud, as are many of their customers. We work hand in hand with them to help them articulate the many benefits of migrating their print to the cloud, which is made easier for two reasons; our solutions are cloud-friendly, and there is channel-value inherent in them.
“This gives us and our partners a solid starting point. By way of example, PaperCut Multiverse – which is our remote print management and support platform solution – adds visibility and control for partners across PaperCut products. It delivers a ‘single pane of glass’, which makes it far easier to seamlessly transition from the more traditional reactive to proactive support models, and to remotely monitor and manage customer PaperCut instances from anywhere at any time. This makes implementing, monitoring, supporting, and adding value to PaperCut customers far easier for our channel partners.
“Additionally, PaperCut’s partners can choose from comprehensive asset resources designed to support them. These range from a global network of local PaperCut post- and pre-sales experts to a dedicated learning and development platform. This is supported by a wide array of marketing assets and industry-leading support. Continually focusing on our channel ecosystem and offering value added tools, has enabled us to work hand-in-hand with partners of all sizes across the globe.” www.papercut.com
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Gary Mellor, Professional Service Manager, Sharp UK: “Providing our channel partners with sales education is really important to us. We ensure that we inform them of the changing trends, cloud options and the benefits that cloud-based solutions can provide. We also promote the available technical and sales focused online training that will help provide the knowledge and skills required to support their customers’ cloud journey. In addition, we provide marketing collateral on our cloud print management offering, as well as Sharp pre-sales consultants that can support our channel partners in their customer cloud-based discussions. It’s really important to us that we support our channel partners and do what we can to set them up for success.” www.sharp.co.uk
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Gabriella Garner, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Kofax: “The vast majority of Kofax business is driven by partners. We offer world-class training and professional services to aid our partners to serve their customers the best they can. This includes analysis, design and deployment of the best system architecture for their print and capture needs. We’ve also designed our SaaS cloud application to be the easiest to deploy in the market, making it a frictionless user experience (user means the end-user and the IT staff). Furthermore, our open APIs allow for robust and industry-specific solutions.”
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Mark Ash, Chief Revenue Officer, Konica Minolta: “Cloud print services are a vital element in our holistic IT services offering which is available to end-users through Konica Minolta’s expert channel partners. With our considerable technology resources and expertise, we enable our partners to deliver the entire cloud print solution – including the printers, software, and cloud hosting environment – all from one expert supplier. By moving the print infrastructure to an expertly managed cloud solution, any business can facilitate a highly mobile workforce with access to fully secure print facilities, whilst also relieving the in-house IT team of the considerable burden of managing the printer fleet and in particular the infrastructure.” www.konicaminolta.co.uk
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Adam Bishop, CRO, EveryonePrint: “We’ve created a SaaS solution that makes it easy for all types and sizes of organisations to move to the cloud, streamline print infrastructures and remove print management pains. We’ve designed a product with strong value propositions for both end-customers and our partner community.
“With the solution itself, we help partners manage all customers in one place with multi-tenancy. We also help design great solutions for their partners and support them forward in their partner journey. They can pull from our expertise when needed and leverage our team as a support system for making the value-add of HCP extra clear, either through sales, marketing, or support.
“On the partner enablement side, we bring monthly campaigns to our partners to help them in their cloud journey. We try to bring new value and promising sales to our partners every month. This is done by hosting webinars as well as sending out monthly newsletters and a flow of new assets. We want to make it exciting for partners to pitch HCP to their customers, which is why we provide tons of co-brandable, on-demand content (blog posts, podcast, case studies, etc.) and ready-made campaign kits with email templates, social posts, sales presentations, and more.
“Our mission is to disrupt the print industry and create new space for existing and future partners to succeed. One way we achieve that is with our online academy, where we share various training and marketing development funds towards incentives, demand-gen activities, events, and more.” www.everyoneprint.com
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Stuart Mabe, Service Delivery Manager, Brother UK: “Many vendors have partnered with the print management software providers to make full integration far easier.
“For example, we’ve just launched a new partnership with EveryonePrint so that all Brother’s devices will be compatible with its Hybrid Cloud Platform. EveryonePrint’s solution enables businesses to use just one driver for its entire print fleet, rather than separate drivers for different brands. That makes troubleshooting printer problems far easier for IT leads, saving them time and money.
“We’ve also partnered with solution providers such as Kofax and PaperCut to ensure that Brother’s devices can be fully-integrated with customers’ existing print management solutions. This offers resellers a way to meet customers’ requirements without overhauling their IT infrastructure.” www.brother.co.uk
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Neil MacDonald, UK & Ireland Channel Director, HP Inc: “HP works very closely with our direct customers and channel partners to find the best solution for their environment. Not only do we offer our own bespoke solutions, we additionally identify ‘best in class’ third-party providers who work with HP and our channel partners to ensure customers have access to technical consultants with significant experience in the space.
“HP has evolved with the cloud journey and has brought to the market industry firsts in this area. HP takes a layered approach to supporting our channel partners which involves establishing access to a team of consultants and specialists to support with technical and sales enablement. We ensure customers are supported in proof of concepts and, if required, our newly formed HP3S offering provides additional delivery options for the solution and any ongoing support required. Having the ability to address each stage of the customers’ journey enables HP to support channel partners no matter their experience and ensure they are confident in fulfilling their customer needs. This flexible and comprehensive approach is essential to supporting our broad range of channel partners.” www.hp.com
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Simon Hill, Managing Director EMEA & APAC, Vasion: “We are training and educating our partners on what to look for in their customers. PrinterLogic’s SaaS-based cloud solution offers advanced features and simple management tools. Our channel partners like how easy it is to implement and how many problems it can solve for customers. With a secure, affordable option like PrinterLogic, companies can make the change to the cloud without worrying about the most common concerns that come with cloud print management services.” www.vasion.com
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Nigel Eaton, UK General Manager, MyQ: “We are answering several of customers’ cloud demands with both of our product lines. MyQ Roger offers top-down digitisation that can be set up by users themselves. They can define their document workflows that match their actual needs directly on their mobile phone. Plus, their set-up workflows will look the same on any MyQ Rogerequipped MFP around the world.
“SaaS is the future and MyQ Roger is already on board. It provides great flexibility and availability – users pay only for what they use, there’s no limit to how many of them can use the service and they also get a free mobile app. All our channel partners can benefit from our transparent and cloud age-ready licensing system as well as from high added value of both our product lines.” www.myq-solution.com
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Tony Lomax, North EMEA Product Marketing Manager, Lexmark: “Lexmark launched its Cloud Print Management offering to partners in the UK in 2020. Lexmark offers partner training and several online training courses and provides information through the PartnerNet scheme to support its partners.
“Lexmark’s partner portal offers access to various tools and resources to keep partners informed. Dealers can go in and gather information about all of Lexmark’s offerings – products and brochures and can also complete training courses on print management and the other Lexmark offerings.
“We also have BSD partners who are already well advanced in delivering a click charge-based managed print service. Still, we have built in CPM, which means they can deploy, monitor and manage printing estates differently, lessening the financial burden of sending engineers out to set up devices, apply firmware upgrades etc.” www.lexmark.co.uk
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Janis Kemers, VP Print & Supplies Europe, Tech Data: “Tech Data is currently working with global print providers and vendors to enable the two-tier channel to offer cloud print management services. Large enterprises do business directly with vendors, but this is much more complicated for SMB resellers, and this segment of customers cannot be neglected; they depend on IT distributors to give them access to cloud print services to become a player. Tech Data is helping to change this by providing an easy-to-engage platform that the resellers can use.
“From a distribution perspective, the service infrastructure must be integrated with vendor systems and host cloud print services to enable resellers to offer service on consumption or subscription basis to their end customers. Transaction billing and invoicing needs to be aggregated and reconciled. This is a complicated commercial and technical process of integration, and resources need to be prioritised; with strategic impact and business size taken into consideration.” www.techdata.com
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PrintIT Reseller: How are you planning to (or already) capitalising on the opportunity to deliver dedicated cloud print management services?
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Mark Bailey, Managing Director, EBM Managed Services: “Our consultancy based approach has always allowed us to speak with our clients on a level to see their business succeed with our business becoming the main supplier for anything technology-related in the workplace.
“Having this approach allows our clients to use our consulting services to ensure their cloud print services are correct for their business and not just the nearest fit. We have partnered with several cloud print services to ensure our clients have the best choice available to them.
“However, sometimes we find not all our clients are suited to or require dedicated cloud print and the cost may outweigh the benefits for a smaller SME environment.” www.ebmltd.co.uk
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Craig Pratt, Regional Sales Director, CMYK Digital: “As a CSP and SaaS provider it makes absolute sense to demonstrate the benefits and to drive our clients down the route of adopting a cloud print management strategy – so we are already capitalising on this opportunity.
“Those businesses that have adopted cloud services internally will have naturally seen a decline in print, in some cases eradicated paper processes. However, some sectors still rely heavily on paper-based processes but still require a robust and accessible way of being able to work with documents, share and collaborate once that paper-based process returns back to a digital format. Therefore, it’s vital that we can continue to provide an integrated solution that pairs both environments together, whilst there’s still demand for print.
“That’s where our expertise around cloud services and cloud print management allows our clients to take advantage of embracing cloud services. We can all see the shift now among print hardware and print software vendors, who are all developing their equipment and services to be deployed into cloud environments and to also integrate seamlessly into cloud offerings.” www.cmyk-digital.co.uk
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James Overton, Director, SOS Systems: “We are lucky, in that we offer some of the leading products with regards to cloud printing, which automatically adds credibility to our name and our offering. Most IT leaders understand that onsite print infrastructure is expensive to maintain and resource-heavy.
“On-premise doesn’t really suit the new hybrid working environment. This means there does seem to be, in general, an appetite to move to cloud printing. Our expertise means that we can be trusted to help our customers make the migration to cloud printing possible and easy, and we are actively promoting that message across our marketing channels.” www.sossystems.co.uk
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