Moya Kelleher
There continues to be a “sizeable opportunity” for growth in the sector, as the OEM remains on course to hit its sign up targets.
Moya Kelleher, Systems Integrator and IT channel Sales Manager at Kyocera, said that a lot of print engagement “has become the domain of the IT department”, MicroScope reported. A lot of businesses replace their printers and cartridges “as and when it is needed” with different people ordering hardware and toners.
The OEM has almost doubled its IT channel workforce over the last six months as it seeks to moves from transactional business to long-term solution sales.
The target is to get 200 new alliance partners, as part of the new channel level launched in the UK last month, and the OEM has so far signed up 90 accounts, while 120 in total have been profiled, since July. The plan is to hit the target over the next few months, with the ‘Alliance’ partners becoming ‘Enterprise’ partners.
The new ‘Alliance’ partner level offers dedicated account management so resellers can offer bespoke solutions to customers, and the new partners are already bringing in revenue. The company replaced its ‘Business’ partner and ‘Major’ partner tiers with ‘Enterprise’ and ‘Enterprise Pro’ respectively.
Kelleher said Kyocera had decided not to include revenue targets for the new partners so as not to put off people from working the vendors, while she also reported that all of the three levels are seeing growth. She added: “We are seeing growth in all of the three levels and we are starting to see a return from the programmes.”
Alliance is a “key area” for the manufacturer as “we haven’t really looked and engaged at that level” which Kelleher described as driving additional market share and transactional business, while “overlay programmes” such as MPS are open to all partners.