News in the Channel - November 2022

REVIEW OF 2022

Rebecca Quinlan , marketing manager, SYNAXON This year has been one of progression. We have helped our partners meet the challenges of

time for techs. There have also been some big influences on trading this past year, with economic uncertainty, a lack of manpower, and the skills shortage being huge challenges. This has led to a reluctance to invest in new technology. However, we believe that by taking advantage of our products and services, every small to medium-sized company can drive efficiency and automate more, saving money, time and effort. Our partners are also grappling with rising prices, hardware availability, and low-margin business models. SYNAXON Managed Workplace is designed to help our partners boost their margins by combining hardware sales with monthly recurring managed services and support. That said, we are confident for 2023 and we will continue to pursue our mission: to help IT resellers increase their efficiency, automate more of their internal processes, and scale their businesses. We are expanding SYNAXON Hub to further differentiate ourselves in the market, adding more Managed Services products, and continuing to develop EGIS, our procurement platform, so that its functionality remains unmatched. We are also constantly working on strengthening our partner community.

volatile supply chains and a changing IT market and are showing them ways to diversify. And with the introduction of new offerings such as SYNAXON Managed Services, we’re seeing better results than we were prior to the pandemic. In terms of major trends from customers in the channel over the past 12 months, SYNAXON has seen that as end customer preferences mature, those customers adopt more cloud and subscription-based services. They also want the latest technology, regardless of where they’re working. These trends will continue to be big in 2023. However, our partners often need assistance with transitioning to business models where they can build steady, predictable income streams based on recurring revenues. That’s why we launched SYNAXON Managed Workplace, a device rental scheme that bundles hardware, software, support and (managed) services, with no upfront costs, payable monthly. In addition, our Master MSP model (an MSP for MSPs), SYNAXON Managed Services, helps resellers scale by standardising and automating complex and routine tasks, freeing up

Rebecca Quinlan SYNAXON

synaxon-services.com

Rachel Rothwell , senior regional director for the UK & Ireland, Zyxel In 2022, we’ve seen business thrive for us and for our partners despite the uncertainty in the market that’s continued into Q4, which is really

towards e-commerce. That grew significantly and while the balance has changed, now that we’re moving to a hybrid work model, we’re seeing the SMB side of business come back strongly. While rising prices, inflation etc has not really impacted our business growth, we and our partners are feeling the pinch on margins. The exchange rate has been eroded – not significantly, but enough for us to look at prices. We are trying to pass on the least amount of the increases as we can, because everybody’s feeling the squeeze. You must remember it is also impacting people – they are having to deal with the cost of inflation, the rising cost of fuel and everything else. You must consider their wellbeing. We gave some of our employees a one-off payment in November, just try and to take some of the pain away. That said, I am confident about 2023 and I expect us to continue to grow, but to what level is too early to say. This last year has been a big one for us. We will continue to focus on our partners and our people and build on the firm foundations of those relationships.

encouraging. It’s easy to talk your way into recession but the word that we keep hearing when we talk to our channel partners and customers is ‘resilience’. That’s positive and refreshing to hear. Our approach during the pandemic was to secure and support our resellers. The work we did with them then – launching the MSP programme and training them in different ways – is paying off now. Our business is certainly well up on pre-pandemic levels and we expect to finish 2022 up more than 40% year-on-year. There have been some noticeable customer trends in the channel over the past 12 months. For instance, brand snobbery is not so dominant anymore. Customers are much more open to new ideas and looking at alternative technologies and providers. That’s partly due to issues around product availability and the work we have been doing raise awareness of Zyxel. During the pandemic, there was a huge shift

Rachel Rothwell Zyxel

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zyxel.com