COLIN BOSHER PROFILE
Always pushing forwards Colin Bosher has been a technology innovator within the office automation, print, and fintec/XaaS sector for more than 30 years. However, his desire is to continue pushing the boundaries of innovation, shows no sign of diminishing just yet.
EKM Global has a reputation for being an industry pioneer, and it is something that company founder places great emphasis on; Colin always seeks to be ahead of the competition by relentlessly developing innovative products, solutions, and services that proactively address gaps in the market, whilst also fulfilling specific customer requirements. Often shaped by historical trend data, logical creativity is part of Colin’s DNA – and it is something he has delivered consistently for more than 30 years. Although his story could have been quite different; he started out as a financial consultant with Cowie Interleasing in the late 1980s – and was successful at it – so much so that an Interleasing customer offered him a role in their company. It was that moment that his journey in the print channel and technology industry began. “I initially worked with a technology company called Misys Group, where after selling them a fleet of new vehicles they offered me a job!” he recalls. He was installed in their industry specialist VAD, Zygal Dynamics who as a subsidiary company were primarily a distributor for Fujitsu selling dot-matrix, system and line printers, as well as the first laser printers from Canon, HP, and Kyocera. “I worked for them for five years, building up a considerable business selling into the channel,” he says. “It was incredibly profitable; we were packaging up pallets every Monday morning and shipping them out to various vertical market system VARs.” From there, he moved to Kyocera. This was at the dawn of ECOSys and the total cost of ownership concept, where Colin was creating some of the first audit assessments for businesses to help migrate from products that were expensive to run. “We sold thousands of devices into corporates off the back of the total cost of ownership approach, making significant savings for those organisations,” he says. Later, Colin put together the first cost per page ‘Print-Plan’ for Cornerstone Estate Agents via Copymore (acquired by IKON ahead of Ricoh), which had about 400 branches. “It worked really well, there was healthy profit in it for our reseller, where the deal was capitalised up front, which made it easier to deploy from a commercial perspective,” he says. After further success in that space, Colin went onto work for HP as the company’s first Hard Copy
specialist ahead of taking on the role of global program director based in Bergamo in Italy, where he was responsible for developing relevant packaged solutions to accelerate the adoption of breakthrough technologies across the two-tier channel. “We had the first Digital Sender device, which was powerful enough to support up to 5,000 integrated applications, and could support 100,000 user address book,” he says. “It looked like an expensive fax machine, although the most successful engagement model was to apply and application centric approach to support technology & workflow optimisation. This was achieved by ensuring seamless integration into core client infrastructures that enabled users to share documents more easily via the network, and specific document processing applications, which further accelerated the industry migration from hard to soft copy document distribution shifting to scan > distribute > archive – print on demand/as required.” In parallel, Colin was also asked to join the global strategic win team for HP working with key stakeholders who were directly led by CEO Carly Fiorina and her husband Frank, working out of Reston, Washington. He then moved on to be European B2B program director for e-procurement and ecommerce before leaving the business in late 1999. Having seen the need to support the multi- brand channel, Colin felt ready to set up his own technology development company, and EKM was born. “EKM was dedicated to enabling the channel to move up the value chain so they could further protect their service business from equipment centric direct mono-brand hardware supply by creating a consistent, repeatable scalable approach
Colin Bosher
EKM Global, Bracknell
CONTINUED
printinthechannel.co.uk
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