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Softcat deepens DEX options with Nexthink
Relationship between vendor and channel player shines a light on employee experience
Nexthink’s decision to work with Softcat has underlined the channel opportunity around Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management.
Sitting in the channel partner’s Workspace portfolio, and a key part of its got-to-market strategy, are the Nexthink tools, which provide insights into performance, diagnosing and remedying issues.
Steve Webster, UK&I sales director at Nexthink, said that DEX is able to combine performance and track employee feelings about their experiences, improving productivity.
“As an organisation, [we have been] fixated around how do individuals interact with their digital workplace, and...we are now very much focused around driving enterprise productivity, helping to deliver insights that allow informed decisions to be made around the effectiveness and the management of a digital environment as it is seen through the eyes of the user,” he said.
He added that ensuring staff are satisfied with their digital experiences is key to ensuring that upgrades and fresh roll-outs are successful: “If you were rolling out a Windows 11 migration, [you could] survey before and after to determine the level of satisfaction that has been driven.”
Webster said there are a wide number of customers that would benefit from DEX, offering the channel a significant opportunity, adding: “There’s a necessity to understand your overall performance as it’s impacting the user.”
Kelly Calver, head of workspace at Softcat, said that a lot of customers are looking to partners to help them with digital experience: “These organisations are regularly being challenged to sustainably keep up with the pace of changing technology. And there are lots of ways they could do that and lots of areas that they could invest in.
“What I feel is most critical to the organisations we work with, as it relates to Nexthink, is its ability to check in on the sentiment and productivity of those users, but also its ability to pinpoint the root causes for bottlenecks in their environment. This allows our customers to be more essentialist in their approach to investments and really deal with those obstacles.
“It [also helps] our larger customers, who are growing not only in size but also in scale – we’ve gone from having 500 people in one office to one person in 500 offices, so how do they maintain that over time? That’s really critical to us as a value-added research to deliver value back to our customers through that investment.”
Jack Lewis, chief technologist of digital workplace at Softcat, said that DEX fits into the wider context of using technology tools to improve productivity and experiences for customers.
“We’ve built a brand new go-to-market over the past 20 months, specifically around workspace, of which Nexthink is a big part of that. But we also have a specific offering that focuses on serving our largest and most complex customers within workspace,” he said.