Moya Kelleher, SI and IT channel sales manager at Kyocera Document Solutions UK, does not beat around the bush when it comes to talking about the vendor’s presence in Ireland.
“We probably haven’t had as much of a presence in the Irish market as we should have had,” she admits. “We’ve not given it enough focus and support, but now we’ve taken the decision to come over and start to give some support to the channel and develop the market and our reseller base. Ireland is an area of targeted opportunity and growth for us.”
Globally, the vendor has been growing year-on-year in last the five years, she reports, and has experienced huge growth on managed print. It has long-term programmes in place in the UK that have been running for a number of years.
In Ireland, Kyocera distributes through SquareOne and has a handful of accredited partners. “We’re putting a focus around growing the IT channel, to support our transactional business and grow our managed print,” Kelleher states. As print comes under the ambit of the CIO or IT rather than facilities or COO, “there are more opportunities coming to the channel for managed print and we’ve restructured our partner programme to support that”.
At the beginning of October, Kyocera restructured its partner programme into three levels of partner engagement, introducing the alliance partner tier for partners of any size to engage with the vendor and get greater access to technical and marketing support, as well as training materials. The company also changed its business and major partner accreditations into enterprise and enterprise plus tiers.
According to Kyocera, the new programme is designed to help partners generate greater margins and build expertise on the full range of its hardware, software and consumable products. The programme is intended to support resellers of all sizes to increase expertise and take advantage of its document management solutions by aligning their services with the needs of their customers.
Specialists
In Ireland, a Kyocera-nominated product specialist inside SquareOne is focused on helping to develop business plans and support marketing at the distribution level. Alliance partners in Ireland will be managed by two internal Kyocera account managers based in the UK. The account managers are likely to come over to Ireland on a monthly basis and the vendor will work with SquareOne to provide supporting collateral and ongoing engagement.
“In an ideal world with an unlimited budget, I’d love to be in a position where we’re engaging with the market and have an account manager based in Dublin,” Kelleher admits, “but unfortunately it’s a chicken and egg situation. We need to get the business plans and engagement in place so we have a valid argument to say we need a presence here. If the business grows and our plans work, we will look at putting additional resource into the Irish market. We have increased headcount in our channel team to properly manage the new partners we’re looking to recruit.”
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