New Alliance Aims to Revive Printer Channel

If you thought opportunities in the printing solutions market were tapped out, think again. There are plenty of ways VARs can expand business and attract new customers with innovative printing solutions, much as Derive Technologies did when they signed a reseller agreement with TallyGenicom.

Derive Technologies’ agreement with TallyGenicom, a manufacturer of business-class printers including hybrid thermal, laser, mobile and impact printers, supplies and accessories, will expand Derive’s channel and increase penetration in the health care, financial services, government and other vertical markets, and will give Derive access to TallyGenicom’s channel partner program, according to the companies.

There’s plenty of opportunity out there for VARs, you just have to know where to look, says Thuy Ledinh, TallyGenicom’s director of marketing, and sometimes that opportunity is in an unlikely place.

For instance, he says, there’s still a large market for dot matrix and impact printing that many solution providers overlook. For customers whose business requires the use of multi-part forms such as car rental agencies, he says, a laser printer wouldn’t be as effective and could increase costs exponentially.

“Laser printing costs about 3 cents per page, and in a situation where you’re printing multiple copies of a receipt, or an agreement – to use the car rental agency example – those costs would be astronomical,” Ledinh says. Multi-part forms allow customers to print at a fraction of the costs of laser jet, and there are a substantial amount of businesses out there with legacy dot matrix technology that need hardware, software and services, he says.

John Wood, vice president of Derive Technologies, says his company’s partnership with TallyGenicom was a logical fit, and would better serve Derive’s customers in healthcare, financial services, government and legal vertical markets. While Derive is also a Hewlett-Packard partner, Wood says that for many specialized customers, TallyGenicom can deliver a much more customized set of products and solutions.

While TallyGenicom offers a full range of thermal, laser, inkjet and impact printers, other major vendors tend to specialize.  Hewlett-Packard, for example, is known for its inkjet printers while Xerox is better known for its laser printers, Ledinh says, while TallyGenicom offers a full range of printing technology.

“TallyGenicom makes products and solutions that we really have not yet addressed in our current marketplace like high-speed, dot matrix printers,” says Wood. And vertical markets like financial, health care and legal are opportunity hotbeds for solution providers, since many of those customers keep voluminous paper records in addition to storing data digitally, Wood says.

Before the reseller agreement with TallyGenicom, Wood says, much of that opportunity passed Derive by. The new agreement will help them better service existing customers as well as increase new business for Derive.

“We saw a lot of our clients spitting out loads of paper, and we realized we were missing a lot of opportunities.  We were leaving money on the table, and so we now have the right solutions to go out and drive new customers,” Wood says.

In addition to the reseller agreement, Wood says managed print services are another growing area Derive is aggressively pursuing.  Derive’s new managed print services initiative, announced today, will capitalize on the TallyGenicom partnership to steer customers away from a traditional ‘break/fix’ model for their printing needs and toward a proactive, hosted model that can cut costs and ease management, service and support.

“A lot of customers have no idea, and don’t even want to know, how costly printing is for them. With network-attached printers, multi-function copier-fax-printers, it’s very, very costly to manage,” he says. Derive’s managed print services initiatives will ease the services and support burden and provide recurring revenue.

“As the economy crumbles, people are more and more willing to talk to you about these printing services, whereas before they really didn’t even want to go there,” Wood says. In short, you can’t afford to overlook these opportunities as companies in every market sector look for ways to cut costs and increase efficiency in every aspect of their business.