Print in the Channel - issue #7

PAPERCUT PROFILE

A cut above PaperCut has experienced strong growth in the past year as the channel has started to recover from the ravages of the pandemic and supply chain issues. Now, the company is focused on growth, supporting its channel and staying on top – and ahead of – the trends in the market.

The word ‘unprecedented’ has been often used in the past three years – perhaps too often – to describe global events. It certainly has been a time of huge upheavals, many of which haven’t been seen in decades. Whether it is global events such as a pandemic, hostile invasion or supply chain issues, to more localised issues such as the return to the office (or not, as the case may be) businesses have had a lot to deal with that is out of their control. With so much uncertainty PaperCut has focused on what it can control. “In this world of unknowns, we wanted to double down our focus on the things that we could control somewhat and drive outcomes,” says Steve Holmes, PaperCut’s global head of sales and channel and the EMEA GM. “We focused our energies on supporting our channels, especially when it came down to winning that shift to cloud and critical areas like learning and certification, increasing lead generation and supporting our ecosystem. We also further advanced our own position in cloud by continually developing and evolving features. “This past year we have also made a large

investment in continuing to build upon our own existing expertise, with new teams and industry experts that can help us along that journey.” This approach appears to have paid off: “We’ve seen a really strong market demand across all of our verticals, which has been great not only for us as an organisation, but for our entire ecosystem,” he says. “Outside of the financials, we hit some great milestones such as surpassing 150 million users globally. We don’t only focus on the financial metrics, we’re also focused on the impact that we’re making, whether that’s environmental or solving problems for our customers. “We’re really pleased with the progress we’ve made this year. As a company we’re always looking to push the boundaries and drive greater impact for our customers and ecosystems, but broadly, it’s been a really good year; we’ve met and exceeded a number of expectations and are excited about building on all of this over the next year.” Building on trends Part of this will be building on the trends in the market currently, such as infrastructure removal. “That comes with the transition to cloud, be that private, reseller hosted or public cloud,” says Stuart Brookes, PaperCut’s head of channel sales and alliances for EMEA region. “There is a trend to infrastructure removal and that’s not just limited to print servers, it’s removing onsite active directories and moving to Azure ID or Google Cloud Identity, removing local area networks and even wide area networks. We are hearing about the transition to 4G or WiFi only offices where organisations are getting rid of all their infrastructure. The internet is reliable and fast these days and companies can work purely on that if they’ve transitioned to using cloud only products.” Stuart adds that there is also a growing trend for what he terms ‘print enablement’. “This is for organisations that want users to be

Steve Holmes global head of sales and channel

papercut.com

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