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European Reseller speaks with Jürgen Biffar President of Docuware to examine the Reseller Opportunities |
| Q. Can you give our readers an insight in to your route to market? What for example is an Ideal reseller ? A. Document Management is not an easy market. You can’t start up today and make money tomorrow. It always requires investment – in human resources, both by the reseller and his customers. Ideally resellers must understand this and commit to investment in training. They will then develop a customer base that will provide recurring business and loyalty. |
Q. Can you explain the business model / value or added value that your resellers will enjoy? Do you sell only through the reseller channel?
A. Yes. The model is quite simple. We call our resellers Authorised Docuware Partners (ADP), and we sign an agreement with each of them. The partner commits to being trained. We commit to supporting him and giving him a certain level of discount. This discount depends on the sales volume, starting at 35% discount and going up depending on sales.
Q. Which part of the channel are you targeting at the moment?
A. Accountants and local resellers including copier channel, which includes multi-function units, particularly VARs that are already supplying accounting software.
Q. Can you define these industries more clearly? Particularly, where your resellers can target for maximum success and revenue streams?
A. We advise on which industries our resellers should target to maximise revenue & profits. For example, they should target the accounts department, which has the documentation problems, rather than IT, sales etc. In other words start with financial departments and industries.
Q. Are there any recent changes in European Legislation that effects your reseller programme ?
A. There are regulations worldwide that require companies to store emails and other communications for several years, depending on the particular industry. Plus regulations in the European banking industry, such as Basle II and Basle III, which have some effects on other industries. The pharmaceutical industry also tends to be highly regulated, led by the FDA . Then there is Sarbanes Oxley, which for now applies only in the US, but I expect this will eventually effect the international market because trends in the US, whether technical of legislative, tend be followed by the rest of the World. Individual countries, for example our home market in Germany, have had our own strict regulations similar to Sarbanes Oxley for a long time, so it is nothing new to German companies.
Q. Can you explain what you mean by Sarbanes Oaxley
A. Sarbanes Oxley requires companies, which trade in the US, to be responsible for financial accountability. This requires extensive documentation to prove compliance, and arose out of several high-profile cases, such as that of Enron, of alleged corporate negligence, or even fraud, over financial matters.
Q. What is the USP (unique selling point) of your product?
A. Interface possibilities. The USP has always been the ease of installation & administration, making it easy to implement and interface with existing applications. As we sell entirely through resellers, who have limited opportunities for product training or the training of customers, it is vital that it is easy to implement a document management solution to make the resellers’ job easy.
Q. How do your ADPs benefit from being part of your reseller programme?
A Q. What support do you offer your channel partners?
A. Continuous training, e-learning, customer support contracts.Telephone hotline too, web training and web support portals for our partners. Q. Where geographically are you recruiting resellers, distributors, and integrators?
A. Mainly UK, France, Spain and Italy. Germany already has a fully populated reseller network, so is no longer a growth market for us. In Scandinavia, Benelux and Eastern Europe, we are mainly driven by enquires rather than being pro-active. However, we usually have at least one Docuware reseller in each of these countries.
Q. What is your vision of the coming decade on what innovations will be available? A. Only about 10% of all potential companies are using document management. This leaves a large potential market untapped at the moment. This percentage has not changed much over the past few years, so the question is, “Why isn’t this growing more rapidly?” I strongly believe that there is great potential for improving the technologies that we have to make them more easily available to the customers.
Q. What are the latest innovative developments within your technology sector?
A. It’s not so much that there will be technical innovations, but that there will be further improvements in ease of use and implementation.
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Jürgen BiffarPresident Docuware |
www.DocuWare.com