Martin Fairman. Credit: Channel Pro
The OEM has identified document management as the next area of growth and wants to educate its partners in how to use it to stay strong as shipments and prints decline.
In an interview with CRN, Martin Fairman, Channel Sales Director for Lexmark, said: “We recognise that our market is in decline, so we have got to help our resellers evolve their business by putting the right devices into the client, and figuring out how we then talk to them about document management and streamlining their business processes.”
But thing are still at the “baby steps” stage as conversations are taking place between the OEM and its distributors, and Fairman says resellers are wary of investing in MPS: “A lot of resellers are unsure about investing in the infrastructure needed, from data collection tools, to people going out and doing a site audit. There is a lot of education that we as manufacturers need to offer the market to really lock down what MPS is.”
“There is great savings to be made from it in all areas. The benefit for resellers is that MPS locks them into their customers, which is what we are all trying to do.”
He added that scanned images are said to be the next big thing for the print market, according to analysts such as IDC, but the immediate challenge is to start charging customers for this service, which has ben integrated in existing solutions until now. Fairman said: “Going forward, we need to educate our resellers on how to start charging for scanned images. We [Lexmark] have been giving away scanned images as part of managed print for too long now and this has real tangible value.”