Vendors buying partners makes print industry 'exciting' - Canon's UK channel boss

James Pittick tells CRN that the trend is part of the constantly shifting nature of the print landscape

The trend of large print vendors buying up resellers adds to the buzz of working in the print industry, according to James Pittick, director of indirect B2B sales at Canon UK.

Earlier this year HP bought Apogee for £380m, following in the footsteps of Sharp, Xerox and Kyocera snapping up their reseller partners.

Pittick (pictured) said this activity has been going on for a while in the industry and it is not something he considers new.

"The market is constantly evolving," he told CRN.

"This isn't necessarily new activity; we've been seeing it for a number of years. That changing dynamic is part of what makes this industry exciting.

"Our strategy is to ensure that we can deliver our technology to our customers in a variety of ways, by giving them the ability to choose how they want to procure and interact with our solutions.

"The organisations that are able to offer the broadest range of routes to market to give their customers the greatest choice on how and who they work with to get that technology will be the organisations that in the longer term have the strongest future."

Canon recently launched its first Canon Business Centre (CBC) in the UK, working with partner DMC Canotec to deliver its services across the South West of the country.

A CBC is where Canon teams up with a regional partner to deliver its equipment and solutions to a specific region, and it has over 130 CBCs across Europe.

"We've been reviewing all our routes to market over the past few years; investing in different ways to get our technology to market and serving our customers," he explained.

"We've seen the success of the CBC in other European countries and for us it represented the ideal opportunity for us to look at the current market in the UK and look at areas where we felt that there was a particular market need or geography that we could serve better by operating in this way with a partner."

The print vendor is currently investing in its channel strategy, according to Pittick, and is on the hunt for a diverse range of partners, such as MSPs and SIs.

"The investment for growth in the company is focused on how we can reach more customers with new partners," he added.

"The strategy will be to continue and develop our presence directly - that remains a constant - but we are looking to get exponential growth in our channel, and looking at different types of partners and programmes."