Ireland’s economic recovery may be export-led but vendors are finding traction with the SMB market when it comes to virtualisation and, cloud and managed services. We approached a selection of experts to see how their businesses are holding up and what applications are driving their businesses without compromising on standards.
Grace O’Rourke-Veitch, country manager, Citrix Ireland
Grace O’Rourke-Veitch says 2012 has been an "excellent" year for Citrix so far with significant growth year on year. This is partly down to increased adoption of desktop virtualisation, particularly among indigenous Irish businesses. There has also been good growth in Citrix’s network business.
The VDI-in-a-box solution is also doing well. "We’ve had quite a lot of SMB customers embracing that technology", she notes, because it’s easier to use and quicker to implement. With a high number of SMB customers in Ireland, VDI-in-a-box is a "perfect fit" for the Irish market and is helping to make desktop virtualisation acceptable.
Virtualisation is coming into its own at a difficult time when some companies are growing but their spend on IT is going down, even as it gets more complex. Desktop virtualisation enables them "to deliver a good user experience to any device", making them more productive and more efficient.
The proliferation of iPads is also helping. "SMEs want to avail of the latest and greatest in terms of enterprise-style applications," O’Rourke-Veitch states. "They’re still blown away by being able to get Windows desktop on their iPad."
People are also more comfortable with virtualisation after seeing the results of what the early adopters have achieved. "It’s not a huge challenge any more to do it, the technology is there," she adds. VDI-in-a-box is also a good way to start the conversation.
The channel is the base for Citrix’s growth and the vendor "needs to continue to do what we’ve been doing". It recently announced a SMB specialist accreditation to back up VDI-in-a-box. "We’re looking to grab a bigger slice of the SMB market," O’Rourke-Veitch explains. In the UK, some partners have already added the specialisation but it also opens things up to those that were previously on the certified level. "It gives them a chance to get involved and re-engage with us," she reveals.
The Citrix service provider programme, which is the vendor’s way of addressing the Desktop as a Service (DaaS) space, is also accelerating quite fast within the channel for existing partners.
In terms of threats, the macroeconomic situation might have been expected to affect sales cycles at the larger level, but O’Rourke-Veitch claims not to have seen that trend this year, "if anything, people are looking to move a little bit quicker. The challenge is keeping the momentum going. Adoption of virtualisation is becoming more prolific and we’re making sure we can capitalise and meet demand".
The pipeline for the last quarter of 2012 "looks very good and we’re tracking to achieve record growth for Ireland this year," she concludes.
Matthew McCann, director, Ricoh Ireland
Halfway through its fiscal year, Ricoh Ireland director Matthew McCann says it is enjoying a very successful period, with a continued increase in revenues. He claims Ricoh is "well on the way to maintaining our number one position on multifunction products (MFPs) in Europe" and has recruited additional staff on the back of some successful contract wins since March.
Picking out a few highlights over the past six months, he points to the Zero Impact Growth Monitor 2012 report from global consulting firm Deloitte that named Ricoh as one of only six global companies "ready to take radical steps to transform their industries towards a green economy." Ricoh was recognised "as one of the pioneering companies that have set measureable and ambitious mid- to long-term targets beyond 2020".
Ricoh introduced the global brand tagline ‘imagine. change.’ this year to express its evolving brand presence around the world. McCann says the new messaging "reflects a general shift toward services for Ricoh, which can be seen in the company’s ever-expanding services portfolio, including our highly regarded MDS (managed document services) and other advanced solutions". With technology changing at an unprecedented pace, there is increasing pressure for customers to change with it. "Those who cannot keep up will be left behind," he argues. "At Ricoh, we are committed to helping our customers embrace change through innovation."
The company is also set to launch new ultra short throw projectors in Ireland.
From Ricoh’s point of view, production print is also significant with the vendor reaching the top spot in ‘production colour press cut sheet printer placements’ in Western Europe, according to market data specialist InfoSource. With the integration of the IBM InfoPrint business into the Ricoh business and its continued partnership with Heidelberg, production print is "a key focus for Ricoh Ireland in the next half of fiscal year 2012".
He describes the channel’s performance so far this year as "healthy, with growth in line with our year-on-year growth over fiscal year 2010 and fiscal year 2011. We are confident we will continue this trend in the second half of fiscal year 2012". Ricoh’s nine key dealers have been very active and are benefiting from its strategy around MPS and MDS development.
The next quarter will be "very strong" and Ricoh expects to continue its growth and "finish out the year ahead of forecasts, with a strong pipeline into fiscal year 2013".
Lorcan Kavanagh, Symantec sales director Ireland, Scotland, UK North
For Symantec 2012 has been a year of consistent growth, and Kavanagh says he is "quite optimistic in terms of how business is developing".
The vendor has placed a "very strong focus" on its value proposition which is "all around protecting people and information", a very relevant message at the moment, he suggests, that is also generating conversations with customers that are "a lot more solution-focused at a much higher level rather than just technology discussions". He describes it as "less of a fulfilment-based conversation and more of a value-based conversation".
Kavanagh says the company’s portfolio around data protection and security is "doing particularly well" on the back of "great developments with our appliance solutions", which allow customers to encapsulate the entire backup environment in an appliance that is easy to maintain, offers high performance and also includes features such as de-duplication.
As an added bonus, the devices are manufactured in Ireland and the supply chain is run out of the Irish business.
Another area of interest, he notes, is Symantec’s cloud-based services. Kavanagh claims the vendor has been very clever by opting to focus on placing particular sets of functions and services in the cloud rather than migrating traditional applications to the cloud. Its cloud archival service has enjoyed "huge growth" because it allows people to access something in the cloud "appropriate to their business and that they can get real benefit from".
On the whole, partners are doing well. The main inhibitor to growth is probably getting "appropriate feet on the street" in terms of having salespeople that can have the right conversation with their customers.
2012 is "shaping up reasonably well" with consistent growth and success over the last 12-18 months looking set to continue.
Martin Deignan, director of sales and marketing, OKI Ireland
Six months ago, OKI was still working through the after effects of two natural disasters in 2011 – the Japanese earthquake and tsunami and the floods in Thailand – that affected its manufacturing. Stock availability was just beginning to return to normal.
According to Deignan, things have picked up significantly to the point where he believes 2012 will be OKI Ireland’s best year in a number of years. "We have a lot of direction and expertise around managed print services and the reputation we developed on the back of that has borne fruit," he says.
The vendor has secured some notable wins in the MPS space, such as Paddy Power and Agnew Cars. It has also just won a tender with Dublin Business School. A lot of the business continues to be with SMEs and OKI’s dealer network "is very important in winning that business". Many of them act as the vendor’s eyes and ears for opportunities. They might be providing general managed services to customers and their suggestions when it comes to MPS are likely to be respected.
Part of OKI’s strength in this area is the network of sales people and engineers it has based around the island of Ireland in places like Cork, Belfast, Galway, Leinster and Dublin. It has helped to convince the channel that OKI can deliver on what it is promising with MPS. Deignan admits it "requires a certain level of investment on our part – it’s not cheap – but if you carry it out properly and professionally, it’s worthwhile at the end of the day".
This is especially true given that the vast majority of dealers lean on OKI to provide nearly all parts of the MPS although small number tend to hold on to the break/fix element. Nevertheless, he stresses that dealers are still "very much involved in the discussions and negotiations up to the time of sale" and play a very important role when the review occurs – usually every six months.
When it comes time to renew MPS contracts, some of which are happening at the moment, Deignan is adamant that the customer is "very much the partner’s client. That never changes. We discuss our thoughts about the renewal, the best way to go about it and how the customer’s needs might have changed". In many instances, the cost to the customer could end up being slightly lower on renewal.
He says that as well as providing an ongoing source of recurring revenue for channel partners, MPS contracts also provide them with more money overall. "In traditional deals, the partner very rarely get the consumables business because that’s a commodity business. If the dealer gets involved in MPS, the total value of the deal will be a lot higher than it would have been with the hardware and it doesn’t need to manage it. The main thing the dealer does is find us the appropriate customer, introduce us and support us on it."
He reveals that MPS is now around half of OKI’s business in Ireland. "It used to be a service adopted by a few large corporates but it’s very much been taken up by the SME market as well. We felt that with the right business model we could bring this service to SMEs as well. We’ve very much led in this sector," he claims.
Ian Moore, VMware Ireland country manager
It’s been a "very positive year" so far for VMware. The market has continued to mature and so has the vendor’s business to provide other products beyond the core virtualisation that "people traditionally think we’re all about", Moore reports.
The vendor is "getting a lot of traction in the middleware space" with the buzz around cloud. People grasp the attraction of having cloudlike infrastructure and being able to expand on demand "but if the applications aren’t able to leverage that, they’ve got a problem. People are looking to modernise their legacy applications and build new applications to scale on demand".
He says certain partners have already moved with expansion of VMware’s product portfolio and it has also identified different routes to market via system integrators and what he describes as "boutique integrators". With technology getting complex, Moore says specialisations are key and questions whether partners will seek to provide everything from top to bottom in the future.
He has observed that business is taking slightly longer to close out as customers do a lot more due diligence than in the past.
Moore has nothing but praise for Avnet which was appointed as a distributor for the vendor last year, saying it has "been absolutely excellent". The partnership has been "very comfortable from the get-go", which he ascribes to Avnet’s ability to improve communication with channel partners and to ensure it’s being done in an clear and concise manner.
He is "quietly confident" that VMware is going to do well in 2012. "You never know until it’s over," he says, "but we’re on track to close out on another record year with support from our partners."
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