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It’s been a busy time for SYNAXON. At the beginning of the year, the channel services group underwent a major strategic shift placing its focus on four key areas of activity: EGIS; SYNAXON Distribution; SYNAXON Managed Services; and the EGIS eCom web stores. The company has also renamed its product distribution operation (previously known as SYNAXON Distribution) to SYNAXON Hub, to bring the UK in line with its German operation.
SYNAXON UK’s Mike Barron explains more.
What sort of a year has it been for SYNAXON? Where have you been focusing your efforts?
The last year has been one of progression and advancement for both us and our partners. We have helped them meet the challenges of volatile supply chains and a constantly changing IT market, and are showing them ways to diversify.
Everything’s easier when you have a great team behind you. IT is no different and that’s why we’ve been continuing to focus our efforts on growing and building our portfolio in the way that we have. We believe that every small to medium-sized company in the channel can save money, time and energy by automating and standardising repetitive and routine tasks, so that they can focus on growing their businesses.
Our partners are MSPs, resellers, retailers and office products dealers – a real mix. The SYNAXON team is the same, and that’s exactly why we benefit from each other. Bundling our strengths and expertise over the past year (and in the years before) has enabled us to build a community that helps us and our partners stand out from others in the channel.
What are the main areas you focus on in terms of partner services?
The three core pillars of our business are EGIS (our e-procurement platform), SYNAXON Hub and SYNAXON Managed Services.
EGIS provides the price feeds of more than 35 distributors at a glance, an automatic ordering function with no extra fees, and a powerful quote generator. Orders can be consolidated to minimise shipments, cutting costs and carbon emissions, making EGIS the ultimate way for partners to streamline their businesses whilst being mindful of the impact on our planet.
Through SYNAXON Hub, our partners benefit from unparalleled product availability, a 14-day return policy and centralised RMA processing. They can draw on our project expertise for complex infrastructure projects. In addition, they can rent their hardware from us and get software, support, and managed services in one bundle.
And finally, whether they’re moving away from break/fix completely, or introducing new lines of business to develop recurring revenue streams, our Managed Services products, combined with our Master MSP model, are designed to help resellers roll out and grow this area of their businesses.
It’s great that you were shortlisted for this year’s Dealer Services award, what do you think were the contributing factors towards this?
The IT market offers many opportunities to grow. We’ve designed our portfolio to help resellers maximise those opportunities with our three core pillars.
When refining our tools, adding additional products and services, or developing new business models to support our partners in an ever-changing IT market, we’re drawing on more than 30 years of experience – and we still dream big. Hard work doesn’t scare us! Results show that our hard work continues to pay off, both for our partners and for the IT community.
And in those 30 years, although our focus as a business might have shifted, our primary aim has not changed: to support our partners by ensuring that the technology and services we provide run smoothly so that they can serve their customers.
In short: our mission is to help IT resellers transform their businesses, and we believe that’s the reason we were shortlisted for this year’s Dealer Services award.
What do you see as the main opportunities for SYNAXON and its partners over the next 12 months?
Automation, efficiency, and scalability will be key factors for our partners over the coming months. If they take advantage of tools in the market, which help them to do this, they can become more competitive. Our focus is to provide the tools, technology and support necessary.
EGIS, our web-based procurement platform, makes the complexity of spending precious time searching for products – then comparing prices and availability across multiple distributor platforms – a thing of the past.
With our buying power, and our own warehouse, we’re able to ensure the availability of the most important product lines through SYNAXON Hub. Furthermore, we get certified at the big manufacturers so our partners don’t have to. Regardless of the size of their businesses, our partners can compete in markets in which they might not be able to if they were working alone.
Additionally, we support our partners on their journey to becoming profitable managed service pproviders. Making this transition can be challenging, so we provide the tools to make it easier. These include helpful step-by-step videos (pricing, sales, marketing), legal documents (contracts, service descriptions), and taking care of often complex technology on the back end (configuration, auditing, reporting) with our Master MSP model. This approach enables partners to scale quickly and easily, whilst continuing to deliver great service to their customers.
With our support, our partners can react and adapt to the ever-changing needs of their customers within the IT market. We help them grow so that they can make the best use of their existing resources without needing to hire new staff.
What will be the main challenges for you and for them?
We speak to many of our partners regularly, and they tell us they’re grappling with challenges such as hardware availability, business models where margins are low, or staff shortages. Plus as end customer preferences mature, those customers tend to want to adopt more cloud and subscription-based services. Our partners often need assistance with transitioning to business models in which they can offer monthly services to build steady, predictable income streams based on recurring revenues, rather than relying on ‘one-shot’ deals. We will soon be launching a solution that helps our partners boost their margins by combining hardware sales with monthly recurring managed services and support.
What are your hopes and expectations for the year ahead?
We will continue to pursue our mission: to help IT resellers to increase their efficiency, automate more of their internal processes, and scale their businesses. We plan to expand SYNAXON Hub to further differentiate ourselves, add more products to our Managed Services portfolio, and will continue to develop EGIS so that the features and functionality of our procurement tool remain unmatched in the market.
We also hope to strengthen our community. We know how important it is for our partners to network with like-minded people, so we offer IT resellers a platform through which they can exchange information on current topics, new technologies, plus trends and developments in the market. Our experience over the years has proven that a user community provides huge value to all involved. We want to offer more and more companies the opportunity to get involved and address challenges they might be facing in their businesses – be they topical, technical or otherwise.
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