The golden age of ‘mega deals’, where a vendor might drop tens of thousands of boxes in a single deal, may be on their way out and or changing as a minimum, thanks to distributed workforces and rise of the SME. At the same time, IT vendors are seeing larger volumes of smaller deals and a growing need to deliver decentralised service and support.
This is according to Jimmy de Waal, Head of Partner Sales at Canon South Africa, who says the days of simply box dropping, and huge deals involving thousands of units delivered to a single building, are coming to an end. “Even before the pandemic, it was becoming clear that customers expected more from after-sales service and support; and that workforces were becoming less centralised. The lockdowns accelerated those trends.”
De Waal says a top priority in the changing world of work is enabling people to be productive wherever they are, with their data secure and compliant with legislation such as POPIA and GDPR. “This has driven changes in how information is managed – in physical printed form or digital form. It has also driven change in how manufacturers support them: now, they must understand how customers are using technology in their new environment; whether their service and support needs have changed; and – importantly – where these individual customers and users are now situated. So service delivery changed from supporting 10 000 people in one building to supporting 2 000 people in one building and another 8 000 working from their homes or remotely.”
For vendors and channel partners, this changing environment brings new challenges and opportunities, De Waal believes. “Vendors and channel partners have had to improve their range and reach. Workforces have been decentralised, so manufacturers must now be able to provide the same levels of service to them wherever they are in the country. Most IT players already had regional infrastructure and partner networks in place, but they may be challenged in improving their support capacity, stock and service delivery speed in line with heightened expectations,” he says.
De Waal notes that remote workers in even the smallest towns have become accustomed to 24-hour e-commerce deliveries, so they will have little patience with an IT service provider who takes days to attend to their needs.
Another significant change is the rise of the digitally enabled SME, he says. “SMEs present huge opportunities for the channel. South Africans are entrepreneurial and resilient, so we expect to see massive growth in the number of SMEs emerging. The SME market has recovered from the pandemic a lot faster than many corporates did, and we expect it to grow exponentially over the next few years. The good thing for our business and other IT businesses is that every one of these SMEs requires its own suppliers, with expertise they don’t necessarily have in-house, to ensure continuity and growth. Vendors and channel partners need to be taking the SME market seriously – if you’re not there helping them grow, someone else will be.
“It’s an exciting time. What will be important going forward will be to have tailored offerings for all sizes of business, wherever they are, and not just focus on large corporates in the metros. IT businesses now need an SME mindset in a corporate world: they must respond to the changes and be able to reach and support SMEs and small offices in small towns and rural areas.
“As a leader in physical document printing and digital document management throughout its life cycle, Canon has invested roughly 8% of its gross revenue to develop solutions that help customers on this journey into the new world of work. We’ve built solutions for government, education, corporates, SMEs and even micro enterprises, to name a few, and we support these customers across every region through a network of quality partners. We’ve been and will continue investing in and improving our ability to support our business partners in the new world of normal work,” De Waal says.
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