Services for the mid-market

Mark Duffelen believes business process outsourcing will represent a new mid-market revenue stream

Business process outsourcing (BPO) has long been an enterprise management buzzword. For 20 years, multinationals have turned to large specialist providers to manage a host of business functions, driving flexibility and cost reduction in virtually any department.

Mid-market companies have seen the returns to large enterprises from BPO and want a piece of the action too. And for the channel vendors supporting these mid-market companies with hardware, the opportunity to capitalise has never been greater.

Mid-market suppliers to the channel mean the local knowledge to deliver bespoke service is backed up by global infrastructure.

Plus, while it has taken the top end of the market 20 years to get to grips with BPO, mid-market companies already know what to expect. After the first few take the plunge I expect the floodgates to open. IT services providers are already moving into managed print, bringing with them a services package more complete than many mid-market channel vendors currently offer.

Moving into services is becoming a crucial step to ring-fence their customers. They need to identify where the opportunities to add value lie and build on their existing success by strengthening customer trust. This trust factor is where the vendor can step in to make the reseller services proposition viable.

Forward-thinking channel vendors are already serving customers’ print infrastructures via their own services platforms, which can be built on toolkits supplied by vendors that deliver customer savings. Customers may benefit from reduced costs on consumables, service and cost-per-page; optimised hardware fleets resulting in lower energy usage and environmental footprint; and freed-up IT resources.

However, in the next few years I expect resellers to offer an even greater range of business IT services, including assessment services, asset management such as PC refresh, datacentre and infrastructure management, proactive on-site support and even cloud-based services such as email.

Innovation, at least as far as the channel is concerned, is moving from hardware and into services. Offering great hardware remains critical but is shrinking in comparison to other opportunities. If this opportunity continues on its current growth path, BPO will very soon become a mid-market buzzword too.

Mark Duffelen is channels group director and general manager at Xerox UK and Ireland