Jim Coriddi
After writing about this industry for as long as I have it’s a given that whether it’s an OEM or a solutions and services provider they can talk a good game about their hardware, solutions, or services offerings, and that’s exactly what Jim Corridi, vice president, Dealer Division, Ricoh U.S. was able to do when I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago about the recent introduction of CHAMPS Cloud IT Services.
If you’re a Ricoh dealer you know all about it already, but if not, the offering, available through Ricoh’s CHAMPS dealer services program leverages technology solutions from mindSHIFT, the company that Ricoh acquired last year and a worldwide leader when it comes to providing cloud services to SMBs. CHAMPS Cloud IT Services includes such services as Total IT Help Desk, Server Management, Hosted Exchange Email, and Email Archiving—the types of services one would expect from a cloud services offering. The cloud IT services will be provided from a variety of recognized industry leaders through a web-based control panel that provides automated service activation and account management.
Components of the CHAMPS Cloud IT Services portfolio include:
- Total IT Help Desk: U.S. based, quick and efficient technical support to manage end-user devices 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
- Server Management: Whether the customer’s servers are on premise, in a datacenter or in the cloud, mindSHIFT’s highly skilled server management technicians know how to manage and proactively support them.
- Hosted Exchange Email: Enables customers to benefit from business email without the IT management hassles. Email, calendars, contacts and more are available at their fingertips.
- Email Archiving: Enables users to safely archive and easily access email for storage, compliance, eDiscovery and disaster recovery requirements.
What this announcement does is expand the number of services dealers have access to via the CHAMPS program. One of the aspects of this program that should appeal to dealers is that they can pick and choose the services they want to use from the program and aren’t forced to provide the entire menu of services offerings. For example, a dealer such as Repeat Business Systems in Albany, NY that already offers Managed Services can select the components of the program necessary to supplement what they already offer.
“The CHAMPS program is unique in the industry because a lot of what the industry considers these types of initiatives are either Managed Services or Managed IT Services,” explains Coriddi. “But CHAMPS is much more than that; we have our production services, our commercial imaging services, which is back file conversion, and then what we call professional services–software and support.”
He adds that this announcement of the Cloud IT Services solidifies CHAMPS as a whole and is the next big piece for Ricoh’s dealers to leverage.
This additional CHAMPS offering broadens Ricoh’s dealer’s offerings and its dealer’s abilities to penetrate into a customer’s business with minimal upfront investment.
“[Dealers are able to leverage these world class resources that we have within mindShift and in a way that’s transparent [to the customer],” notes Coriddi. “When mindShift goes in and provides these services, they’re acting on behalf of the dealer who holds the relationship and does all the billing.”
Another key element of Cloud IT Services offering is the level at which Ricoh can support the dealer. mindShift has been around and successful for the last 15 years and provides a U.S. based 24/7 Hot Line.
“And they’ve been doing it with a partner reseller program so they have a lot of experience working as that invisible third party,” adds Coriddi.
Dawn Abbuhl
Dawn Abbuhl, president, Repeat Business Systems, Inc., in Albany, New York, is miles ahead of many other dealers on the Managed Services front and fills in a lot of those gaps via CHAMPS. Repeat initially wanted to target customers with 50 to 200 users, but with this program, it can be as small as a five user network or as large as a 300 user network. Plus Abbuhl sees immediate value in the e-mail archiving.
“We can host all e-mails for law firms who have to keep e-mails for a certain number of years.”
Repeat didn’t have the capacity to do that before or the ability to provide the kind of security those types of customers require. She adds that this will also be beneficial for Repeat’s healthcare clients.
She also likes the 24/7 U.S. based support. And, equally important, she says, “I trust it.”
That’s critical for both the dealer and the customer.
How will Ricoh gauge the success of this new initiative?
“We’re going to have a couple of different metrics,” explains Coriddi. “We’re starting to [establish] numbers as far as targets, number of opportunities, number of proposals, and ultimately revenue generated. Now that our dealers are making this more of a part of how they do business the best way for us to look at it is how many customers are these services touching. The short answer is we’re going to have some traditional type of metrics established, and another way is what we see being generated in the form of equipment.”
That latter statement is somewhat of a surprise, but not really when you dwell on it.
“At the end of the day Ricoh is still a manufacturer and we still want to be placing MFPs and printing devices,” acknowledges Coriddi. “We also are gauging it towards what kind of growth we see in the overall business…it’s still about expanding [our dealer’s] customer MIF and broadening [their] business.”
This is just another example of the acceptance of the CHAMPS program which has started to grow in the last year after a slow start. “Dealers are saying if we did not have this we would not have landed this deal,” observes Coriddi. “That’s how we know it’s starting to take hold and that’s what’s grabbing the attention and the imagination of our dealers. We feel like we have a solid foundation and are starting to broaden the portfolio.”
And moving CHAMPS into the cloud is a natural progression for growing the portfolio as any.
And for Repeat, well, it just may lead to repeat business. I asked Abbuhl what things would look like at her dealership a year from now with this new offering in its toolbox?
“This gives us a little more leverage,” she says. “We can offer them IT support and software and can be their vendor for all of it.”
