SYNNEX Corp.’s Senior Vice President TJ Trojan, who oversees the VISUALSolv and PRINTSolv business units, sat down with ChannelPro-SMB at the distributor’s National Conference to talk about how technology is converging-managed print has expanded into document management and other areas and digital signage now embraces related technologies such as videoconferencing, for example-and how SYNNEX adds value by providing expertise to SMB VARs around vertical market solutions.
ChannelPro-SMB: Let’s talk about PRINTSolv. How has the managed print market changed in the past three to five years?
TJ Trojan: What’s happening today is that transactional print is down-people are printing fewer pages. It’s [being] green, it’s mobility, and it’s everyone having a tablet. Managed print is happening, but the big factor in managed print today-which started in the enterprise space but is moving downstream to the SMB-is there’s so much convergence and change going on.
ChannelPro-SMB: So what’s happening with printing and IT in the SMB space, and how does it compare to what copier dealers are doing?
Trojan: Before, a small and medium business would have maybe one copier and they would work with their copier dealer, and on the IT side it might be the same thing. But today the users are looking at green, they’re looking at vertical applications, compliance, security with print, and they’re looking at moving to workgroup [printing]-larger size printers.
Some of the transactional print-the A4 print, which is the less productive print [with] fewer pages per minute-has moved upstream. So the HPs and the Lexmarks, the Brothers and the OKIs of the world have all moved up with higher-end printers. And one of the reasons they’re doing this is because the end user is looking at all this convergence taking place, and typically a copier dealer can’t provide those solutions-they can’t provide mobility, compliance, and cloud.
What we’re seeing is that end users are not just talking about whether they want to go to managed print, but how do they integrate all of the [available] opportunities. Managed print really is one component. There’s [also] document management, wide-format print, workgroup, compliance and security, cloud, and vertical market applications.
So the real opportunity today for the SMB reseller is to go in and provide solutions to all of those. It’s not just that there are tablets out there and mobility out there and that people are printing less, but they are a little confused with how do I change and take advantage of all these [technologies].
We’ve been in the managed print space for six or seven years. Today when we talk about PRINTSolv, we’re talking about managed print, but all those other things as well. Our PRINTSolv team now is not just focusing on managed print, but on document management and A3 copier business, and all those other converging activities.
ChannelPro-SMB: Are a lot of your SMB partners offering document management?
Trojan: Yes. It starts at the enterprise, but one of the reasons you’re seeing small and medium business resellers move to document management is because it’s all going in the cloud. So it’s a cost-reduction opportunity for [their clients] to use the cloud for a lot of their software. A natural [fit] for that is document management. They can pull their documents from the cloud.
This is what I would tell SMB VARs: Everyone is worried that there are fewer pages being printed. But it will continue to be a large market. There won’t be as many pages printed in the future as there are today. But SYNNEX doesn’t look at the market as printing paper. That’s a component of managed print. We look at all of those different opportunities, so we provide solutions, especially for the small and medium business VAR, solutions around cloud and mobility and vertical market applications, and around document management. These are really profitable opportunities. The midsize end user and the small user are looking for those solutions.
The market opportunity is probably five times larger than what [VARs] saw before, which was selling printers and supplies.
ChannelPro-SMB: Tell me about VISUALSolv-what does it encompass?
Trojan: All of our Solvs are about providing solutions around certain vertical markets. On the visual side, and I’m not going to include mobility in there, because if you think about it visual starts with a mobile product like what you have in your hand. You see a lot of convergence there too, social and IT convergence in the handheld device. And there are a lot of mobile applications especially in education where the teacher might have a tablet and you’re showing it on a big screen or projector.
Several years ago we started VISUALSolv, but we started expanding it because we saw a lot of overlapping opportunities. In fact, when you look at a community of resellers and the small and medium business market, you would see that resellers who sold digital signage often would sell videoconferencing. They would also be selling projectors into the education market, [and] they would be selling business security. And, as analog has moved to digital IP over video, that’s where SMB VARs have an opportunity-they did not understand analog, but they understand digital and IP and the network.
Now audiovisual and IP and the network are converging, so [there are] all of those opportunities. You used to go into a conference room and there was just a projector-same thing in a classroom-but today you see large-screen projectors, digital signage in early warning systems, videoconferencing-and they’re bringing down information from the cloud. So this is another example where the opportunities for small and medium business VARs is really in the convergence of all those things.
So our visual solutions strategy is taking all of these [technologies] that in the past were somewhat disparate strategies-videoconferencing or digital signage or early warning systems, business security, and even in some cases custom installation like in the home-and providing expertise around these overlapping capabilities. We have sales expertise, technical expertise at levels 1, 2, and three, and the last one is broadcast.
ChannelPro-SMB: When one of your SMB VARs comes to you and says, I’m providing X service already in this vertical market, but I don’t know anything about security. What role does SYNNEX play in that scenario? How do you help them with the piece they’re missing?
Trojan: This is really SYNNEX’s secret sauce. To be relevant to our dealers we have to have a lot of value. The evolution of distribution, and I think this is really true of SYNNEX, is adding expertise around vertical market solutions and platforms.
It’s much harder to get a new customer than it is to keep an old customer. And for most of our partners, for most resellers, you’ll see them go in and they might have expertise around the data center or the network or the back office. But that customer is buying other products-they’re just buying them from someone else. So it’s exactly what you said. What we tell them explicitly is you’re selling networking to a customer and they’re asking for a digital signage solution. You don’t have to know how to do it; we know how to do that and we’ll show you.
Our hope is, and it’s generally true, if you go out and support a reseller with a digital signage solution or a 21st century classroom solution where you’re using all these converging technologies, and you help them two or three times, they don’t need your help after that. It’s like teaching someone to fish. In the end they end up going out and finding their own business to power their own opportunities and close those opportunities, and they’ll also invest in infrastructure to provide that, and we’ll provide the training.
We have more than 30 people on our visual solutions team, and if we include our salespeople it’s over 50. We have level 1, 2, and 3 technical support, and they’ll design solutions for our partners. We’ll talk directly to the end user because as a distributor we never sell to the end user, but obviously we don’t mind working with end users. The idea is we can teach them how to go wider within their customer base-it’s a lot easier for them to grow their business.
What we get out of it is a really loyal customer and they tend to be higher value, higher profit opportunities, so they’re not going to beat us up over a dollar or two. We invest in these activities and we’d like to make a little bit of money as well. Everyone is better off-we invest, they invest, and it’s much more profitable.
