After Xerox made its biggest announcement in 110 years, the focus for the document vendor is turning to the channel community.
In the next 12 to 18 months, Mike Feldman, the Xerox North American leader, said the focus will be ratcheted up from Xerox in an effort to expand its multi-branded dealer channel in the U.S. and Canada.
According to Feldman, Xerox would be able to grow its base faster with multi-branded channel partners especially in the SMB market than to do more channel recruiting.
He does believe in more feet on the street, however and is considering partnering with solution providers who have no printing and imaging or a managed print services (MPS) practice.
Mike Feldman
“IT VARs tend to do more alliances. They can bring us into deals. We can definitely work that way with solution providers who are not focused on print because they would be interested in solutions such as workplace services or workflow automation,” Feldman added.
Feldman told CDN the new set of VersaLink and AltaLink multifunction printers play very well in Canada since the nation is an SMB-centric country. Xerox has Laser Networks as its primary MPS provider in Canada, but Xerox is only using them in a complimentary fashion to the entire MPS network of partners as the document vendor plans to expand its channel network.
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Currently Xerox has a strong mono-channel network in Canada. Mono-channel stands for solution providers who only carry Xerox MFPs, Feldman said.
“When we go and start to sign up multi-branded partners. A fair question is would loyal partners to us get upset? We want to be careful in places where we have strong representation in a geography, but where we do not see capacity and high market share is where we want to expand,” Feldman said.
Feldman wants to grow by about 50 new partners, but would be happy with 20. Xerox has 185 partners.