Xerox ‘X’panding with new innovations

In a tete-a-tete with The DQ Channels, Balaji Rajagopalan, Executive Director, Technology, Channels and International Relations, Xerox highlights its product roadmap and strategies Xerox is working on.

How was your business performance in the past year and in FY 2016?

Last year, the business performance was very good. We did very well in the production space and also did well in office business. This year, we are aiming to grow in double digits in the office space. Also, a lot of new launches have happened in the last couple of months. So, it was a solid start for 2016 I would say in the office space and once again PSGs continue to contribute well.

What is your GTM strategy?

I look after the technology and channels business which clearly is going through the indirect business model route. So, we keep partners in the centre of all our strategies, starting from the lowest segment to the highest penetrating, from A class cities to B, C and D class because the partner gives us the strength to penetrate in different cities across the country.

I think our GTM is very clearly focussed on product portfolio where we offer a complete range of products which support the marketplace, be it for Corporates, SMBs and so on. Second is from the perspective of partner network which has grown more than 10% in the last one year, in terms of adding new partners in new unexplored territories. With their help we were able to successfully launch ConnectKey2.0 enabled 14 iSeries devices a few months back which supports technology, software, security, mobility and so on.

Now our focus has shifted to improve our enterprise platform. The whole prima facie of Xerox is not to offer a product but solutions to our customers so that they can focus on their core area of operations, leaving the rest to us thereby promoting all-around productivity.

The iSeries along with the ConnectKey2.0 gives enterprises the power to do things very differently with the assurance that products like PCs and laptops can go into any corporate network without any worry from the IT manager’s end .

Our strategy comes for products which address different segments that are very critical from overall growth perspective and at the same time use the partner network to do things differently. So far, we have already completed two partner engagements in the country- one in Mumbai for the Western region and one in Chennai for the entire Southern region. We are now running it for Northern, Central and Eastern  regions in Delhi NCR. We are one of those organisations which do partner meetings on a regular basis. We involve them to form strategies for the next year during the Xpand workshop in December after which we have an annual kick-off in January followed by partner meets. Our strategy revolves around product and partners in totality.

Tell us about Xerox Channel structure and Channel programs?

We have a 2 tier model with two distributors, one being Supertron that was recently appointed as our new distributor. Apart from operating in Tier1, national distributors for PAN India add value in terms of national market outreach, bring their own ideas, enable us to connect with more partners. On the other hand, Tier 2 is all about our partners who could be mono partners or multi-brand partners and are more than 150 in number.

Apart from that, there are 30-40 partners who we engage with from time to time, as and when the requirement comes. Incidentally 70+ partners are from the Northern region besides central and eastern regions. Within these, the partner could be a production partner alone, office partner alone or a sales partner looking at the product line, sales and services together. More than 80% of our partners are sales and services partners as we not only want them to sell our machine but provide after sales services too, giving a lot of flexibility to the customer in the process.

Moving onto programmes, we are one of the few organisations that involve partners every year and in the last two years, we have institutionalised many things which are unique and different. At the end of the year, we organise sessions called Xpand, to plan and strategize for the coming year and discuss the scope of work of all the parties involved, which is very unique. X in Xpand stand for Xerox and is conducted in three cities to ensure localisation according to the regions. This session is followed by workshops to have holistic view, allowing everyone to be aware of what is expected of them. The Xpand session is followed by the kick-off in January. Additionally, we have the XPL i.e. Xerox Premier League, media partner meets, product schemes and programmes aimed at motivating our partner and sales community. For example, in Q4 we sent almost 15 partners to the Drupa, in Q2 14 partners went to Singapore on a cruise. We also believe in tangible rewards like gold, iPhones, iPads etc.

Xerox is focusing on office enterprise space. Tell us more about it.

There are two things in the office enterprise space. Xerox is the only organisation that has Managed Print Services for partners which we call XPPS (Xerox Partners Print Services). Unlike other organizations, we provide these services directly as well as indirectly. We focus on enterprises here as they are increasingly moving from Capex to Opex and want something which will improve their overall productivity, eliminating unnecessary waste, making sure that the product is kept where it is required to be and the vendor takes responsibility for e-disposal.

We aim to come up with solutions and softwares which enable things to happen proactively so that the mission uptime is longer while ensuring the solution is such that a lot of things can be done effectively- be it security of the device or mobility. We want to streamline the workflow, bring in efficiencies, increase productivity and in this process, find ways to do things differently at a lower cost.

From the enterprise perspective, in order to be efficient, firms wish to reduce duplication and we help them do that. We allow them to set rules and preferences, say regarding black and white only, duplex printing to save paper or set time constraints. We advise our clients to only print what is required and give alternates to printing. This makes us their most preferred brand.

So, how is it going with ConnectKey? How is the response?

Since it has just been launched, the initial response is very good. There is a lot of excitement as we are trying to crack multiple deals, however; I can’t share much on that as of now. Everyone from our partner community to sales people understands what it is and we have done the sales training for the partners already last month covering 140 sales force across the country.

Tell us more about government deals. What is going on?

DGSND is a rate contract. The government has decided to go on the route of GeM platform like e-tendering. So, the PMO is driving GeM online platform. Once it comes, it will be a combination of Amazon, Flipkart etc. which implies that they want to become more transparent. Right now it’s in the process. Honestly speaking, it’s not yet concluded. We are all trying to seek support of this so that we can take it forward.

What are the regions you are focusing on

We are not only focusing on regions, but also towns. We have over 100 cities & towns.  With over 150 partners across the country, we organise region based events because we understand the each region differs from the other and hence needs a different, customised approach. We are also delving deeper into the Tier 2 regions so as to connect better to a wider audience and in the process setting ourselves apart from our competitors. ConnectKey is also based on the inputs that we got from our enterprisers.

Moreover, we are the only company with a R&D centre in India. The Xerox R&D centre in Chennai innovates for our market worldwide but has a local flavour.

We also encourage feedback and set out an hour in our workshops dedicated to it. The Docucentre SC2020 is in fact a response to the feedback we got, where in our partners mentioned the need of a colour printer at the entry level.
What is your product roadmap for the next 8-10 months?

We have had many launches this year and plan to make them a success first. On the technology and channels side, we have two verticals; one caters to the office space while the other caters to the production space.  In the latter vertical, we launched plenty of products last year including banner printing options. The whole idea now would be to do that effectively and keep improving the market share. Where as in office space, we launched more than 17-18 products between the last and current month. Our key objective is to make sure that our partners take to these products well.  With quite a few sales of Docucentre 2020 and a positive feedback, we will now focus on doing a lot of demonstrations and delve deeper into the marketplace. With over 1,20,000 MFD devices in India’s A3 market, we are confident of a deeper penetration, especially targeting the entry segment enterprises.

Also, having a wide production portfolio with 30+ products, Xerox is currently the only organisation with products ranging from the lowest to the highest price level. We are also very proud to say that 50% of the business comes from existing customers which is primarily due to the fact that we have a solution to every customer’s need which clearly shows the power of Xerox’s post sales service.

Since we want our partners to be more business oriented, we are also planning to launch a product with an ‘all out’ model thereby empowering them with everything they need.