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Lexmark looking to partners to gain A3 market share
Print player Lexmark has armed its channel with a range of options as it looks to enter the low-page volume end of the market
Lexmark is looking to its channel to take its latest range of A3 products and cloud services to the market after the vendor rolled out its latest product offerings.
The print player held an event in Frankfurt, Germany last week to unveil the extension of the A3 range and enhanced artificial intelligence (AI) services to an assembled audience that included numerous channel attendees.
Last year, the vendor entered the A3 space for the first time after having traditionally focused on the A4 format. Channel partners had been calling on the firm to not only deliver high print-rate options for enterprises, but lower page volume options for smaller customers.
Arjan Paulussen, managing director for Western Europe and English-speaking Africa at Lexmark, said it was expanding its hardware footprint and saw the channel as a vital part of the success of the A3 products.
“We had a lot of questions over many, many years, in particular from our channel partners that said, ‘Lexmark, we love your A4, but can you also do A3?’,” he said.
“We started that last year and introduced a line that was tailored a little more for the high end, so high page-count environments, and now we’ve brought a line that is also tailored for the lower end environment … and that suits in particular our channel partners really well.
“The partners now have an offering starting from 25 pages per minute to 35, and then we blend in the other lineup that goes all the way up to 55, and it’s a unique value proposition.”
Paulussen said it took feedback from partners and “intentionally engineered” products that would be carried via its channel to meet customer demand and take the firm into fresh markets.
“We put a lot of thought into that in terms of the markets we can serve,” said Paulussen. “The high end of the channel market, in terms of page counts, the enterprise market, typically with contractual agreements, management services, but also the market where, thus far, we were not present.”
Lower page counts
Paulussen added that Lexmark was looking to the channel to help it gain market share in a product space where it had not previously competed. “Lower page counts, 25 page a minute, that’s a massive space that Lexmark was not in. That’s what makes us so excited because we now have a play across the entire range,” he said.
In addition, Lexmark added more AI-supported translation and redaction features into the cloud services offering that partners can take out to customers.
Paulussen said the majority of its channel delivered both hardware and managed print services, but it was able to support those without an in-house services capability with an MPS Express offering.
“We’ve had tremendous success with managed print services,” he said. “We have a very strong capability to keep our clients – last year, our contract renewal rate was 100%, and we didn’t lose one customer, and we like to think we create value throughout the entire contractual process.
“The channel is incredibly important for us, and all the more now because of our expansion with A3,” said Paulussen. “We can make big leaps now, and we can serve channel partners that have asked us for many years … now we have that end-to-end offering for them.”
