EKM Global was recently acquired by TD SYNNEX but it is business as usual for the managed print services provider, which is now focused on growth in the UK and across the world.
For Ian Silvester, the past few months have seen many changes personally, as he has stepped up to a new role at EKM Global, following the departure of founder Colin Bosher after the completion of a deal that saw TD SYNNEX acquire the company, but he is content for EKM Global’s customers to see very few changes – apart from upgrades to the company’s services.
While TD SYNNEX now owns the shares of EKM Global, as Ian notes, the company remains a separate legal entity. “This means that our data remains our data and our customers’ data remains our customers’ data,” he explains. “This is important because customers don’t want their data shared.
“The relationship we have with TD SYNNEX works well, as it means that we’ve got a backing of a big partner, but we still have the flexibility and nimbleness of a small company. It also means there has been no real difference for customers.”
As mentioned, there have been some changes in personnel at the top and additions to the team, especially within the team that runs EKM Insight, the company’s MPS software infrastructure.
Ian, as director of product management and customer care, now heads up EKM Insight and has been building the team to help achieve his growth ambitions for it.
Growth focus
The focus for EKM Global is now on growth, especially in Europe, the Middle East and Asia (EMEA), the US and Latin America. “We are growing quickly in EMEA, having secured major new customers in the Middle East recently,” Ian says.
“But EKM Global is growing across the globe. We are in 104 countries and have more than 2,000 resellers – of which about 1,000 are in the US. We now have 20 languages in the system – the last one we added was Finnish – and have the capacity to add more as necessary.
“We’re looking to gain volume in the US and in Europe,” says Ian. “We’re working with many dedicated managed print services resellers, but we’ve also got programmes with distributors. The Open MPs programme is one with TD SYNNEX and that’s being pushed heavily into IT solutions providers that haven’t got any print experience. Their key market is servers, desktop, support routers and such like.”
EKM is working with distribution partners to put packages together that they can sell to their resellers. “We’re working very closely with them in the UK, EMEA, the USA and Latin America,” says Ian. “We’re just doing a programme with one of the big reseller distributors in Latin America that want to offer the services their resellers. So that’s going to grow, hopefully exponentially, in that region.”
In the UK, EKM Global is growing its managed print services software, including technology to ensure it can integrate with more back end purchasing systems. “There’s a lot of ERPs out there, especially in Europe, and we plan to get integrations with those,” Ian says.
“We’re also constantly adding more features into the programme. We’ve got some larger features we’re adding in now, but after that we’ve got a whole roadmap of incremental gains, which, when you’re talking about things that occur in large volumes are really important. If we can reduce the time to do a job by 10 seconds or reduce the number of clicks to complete an action – for example, if you can take ordering a consumable from three clicks to two clicks and you’re doing that 1,000 times a day you reduce the time it takes for that operator to work the system. And if you can reduce it to zero clicks then you’re laughing, which is our goal on a lot of these things. These things really build up savings over time.
“We work very closely with our distributors and resellers and the bigger ones we have one-to-one sessions with, and we ask them what they want, and this is something that often comes up.”
Analysis
Customers are also increasingly asking EKM Global for solutions to help them to micro analyse their data. “A lot more customers are micro analysing their data, looking at the yields from toners and such like, are those customers getting enough clicks to modify it? We’re providing a lot more reports to people to do that.”
Ian adds that upcoming releases, slated for the summer, will enable customers that have Power Bi – an interactive data visualisation software product developed by Microsoft – to pull data from their ERPs and from the Insight software and merge the two together. “This will be incredibly powerful for them. Some customers already do it now, either through direct links into the data that we’ve provided for them, or they use reports that we’ve created. But putting a Power Bi connector is just going to make it easier for them to just drag and drop what they need, whereas now, they must do a little bit more work on things like SQL. This is what customers have been asking for.”
Sustainability
Sustainability is another increasing concern for customers, and EKM Global is helping them to recycle and reduce their carbon footprint. “We’re partnering with people to look at the new European directives on recycling of consumables and things like that,” says Ian.
“We’ve also got some programmes coming on board that will help with that green agenda in terms of recycling inks and toners as well. We’ve also got things like a mobile app that uses augmented reality support to help customers with the maintenance of their print portfolio, which helps to reduce the number of times engineers must travel to a customer site, thereby reducing carbon emissions that would have been created by driving a van there.”
With so much going on, the future for EKM Global is bright – especially with the backing of a global players such as TD SYNNEX – and Ian is looking forward with confidence as the company continues to provide what customers want.
