No longer just printing

For the past two years, Lexmark has run a unique program connecting resellers with business consultancy teams in order to design and deliver the best ‘solutions’ for its corporate customers.

The way it works is that accredited resellers may enlist the support and advice of the company’s business consultants (some have been headhunted from firms like PwC) so as to be better prepared to vie for more challenging contracts.

Driving this need, according to Tim Champion, channel business manager Lexmark A/NZ, is a combination of dwindling hardware margins on the part of vendors and the channel, while for the customers, the challenge of integrating ‘output’ hardware with corporate systems is demanding much higher levels of expertise.

Further illustrating this transition is the fact that corporate copier sales have been falling as workers move towards printing, moving the emphasis further towards the PCs.

"We believe there is a whole new market category called ‘output solutions’ and we are developing a consultant practice to assist the channel and customers to allow customers to implement and improve business processes. It’s not, 'I’ve got the best printer', it’s, 'I’ve got the best solution for your business'," says Champion.

Lexmark's Champion: Working with an enormous variety of business systems

Lexmark says that the success of this model reflects the diverging needs of different work groups within the corporate environment and the need for ‘right-fit’ solutions. The program is also structured so as to be very inclusive of the channel while of course benefiting from the fact that Lexmark is so wholly focused on printing. "Driving sales engagement allows us to work very closely with the channel."

Along with its consultancy emphasis, Lexmark boasts broad compatibility between its products and a wide range of corporate functions such as business process management, electronic content management, business systems, document management systems and electronic forms processing.

"Our ability to work with an enormous variety of business systems is pretty unique," Champion says. He adds that access to sophisticated integration tools ensures that customers are not pushed into buying niche equipment, which is normally more expensive and harder to support.

Generally speaking, corporate spending on printing or ‘output’ equipment and solutions accounts for around 1 to 2 percent of total company revenues, according to recent research by Gartner, while, ironically, paper usage is growing by between 3 and 6 percent depending on who you ask. Further, well implemented printing solutions can also help companies reduce help desk volumes by as much as 50 percent.

"When you’re looking at the billions spent on printers and copiers, what customers need is some sort of framework to reduce the cost of that investment," Champion says.