Print.IT Reseller - issue 56

01732 759725 40 INETRVIEW an exciting new concept that brings a new dynamic to the market, providing a wide range of creative opportunities for educational establishments in particular. It’s a new talking point and provides the perfect accompaniment to 3D printing. Then there is obviously scanners, looking at document management, document scanning and how that complements the whole print ecosystem as well. I think scan is the next wave, it complements our business very well. The one other thing that I will mention that we haven’t touched on is finance and leasing options. We are looking at this the moment, and speaking to our brands about it. As time has moved on, distribution is changing. If we look at the way people buy their technology, particularly in the OA space, it is customary to buy on lease and finance. Last year, Rik Hubbard joined the business as Commercial and Services Director for the mobile division. He joined from Samsung where he actually set up Samsung finance for copier dealers back in the day, he is supporting me in taking a similar proposition to our brands in the copier space. PITR: When will that be available? JB: This is something that we can actually offer today. It’s available now, like all of these things, it’s economies of scale. Essentially there’s nothing we can’t do within reason from a service capability perspective, but really it’s about people having tangible opportunities that we can actually move forward with. PITR: In an ever-changing market, and continued consolidation what does the future hold? JB: I think it’s an interesting time, and within this interesting time, I’m most comfortable sitting in a distributor. Distribution is a good place to be in the marketplace at the moment. I think there are eleven print brands, at the moment and if you look at that versus say in the computing market, there are probably more print brands than there are computing brands, in a market that’s probably a tenth of the size. My prediction is that we’re going to see much further consolidation. It probably won’t be on such a large scale as the last two deals (HP’s acquisition of Samsung and Apogee) as they’re both pretty much as high-profile as you can get. I think we’ll see more consolidation of brands, more consolidation of resellers, the interesting thing will be if we see more consolidation of brands and resellers, because in the copier market it’s quite commonplace. But what we’ve yet to see is a brand acquire a reseller within the IT reseller space. That really would put a cat amongst the pigeons, but I could see it happening. www.exertis.co.uk ...continued If we look at the way people buy their technology, particularly in the OA space, it is customary to buy on lease and finance