I had the chance to speak with John MacIness, President of Print Audit and West McDonald, VP of Business Development for Print Audit about the recent acquisition of NeoStream.
My first thought when I heard the news was this recent Xerox publication:
A recent Xerox International research effort reveals that nearly half (46%) of SMB’s will turn to office equipment resellers for help with paper free solutions. In addition, 25% will look to their IT provider and 37 percent to the product manufacturer.
Art: The last time we spoke at the Top 100 Summit, you stated something big was coming down the pike for dealers. You were right, this is BIG! Do you have time for a few questions?
West: Fire away
Art: How can Print Audit help office equipment dealers capture a portion of that document lifecycle business?
West: Print Audit is poised to help with the 71% of customer needs covered by office equipment dealers and IT providers. Thanks to the NeoStream acquisition we can help with printed pages and entirely digital ones. None of our competitors can do both, it’s an industry first.
Art: Print Audit’s current Premium subscription service offers “x” amount of licenses per month for “x” amount of dollars per month. Will you be using the same subscription model for your new document management solutions? In addition what types of plans will be available to the dealer?
West: Premier members will be able to upgrade to Premier Plus for an additional monthly subscription plan. Additionally we will likely offer a stand alone ECM subscription for those who won’t be doing managed print.
Art: What is the advantage to the dealer with the subscription based monthly billing model?
Under Premier a member’s costs are fixed, no matter how much they grow. The more they grow, the better their margins get.
Art: Can existing Premier Dealers upgrade to the new Premier Plus Program?
John: Absolutely! Premier members will actually have an exclusive window to upgrade and provide NeoStream solutions before we open it up to the world at large.
Art: What is the benefit to office equipment dealers to offer management of the entire document lifecycle?
John: We all know that pages per user are in slow decline and that digital documentation is growing exponentially. The benefit to the office equipment dealer is to stay relevant as their customers needs evolve. They’ll stand to make a lot of money if they do that right.
Art: Can you tell us more about the advantages of the “buy vs build” scenario for SharePoint?
West: Anybody that works with SharePoint knows that it’s extremely powerful. They also know it can be a beast to implement. Building is really, really hard. NeoStream makes it much, much easier to get Sharepoint functionality right out of the box. NeoStream does that better than any other provider.
Art: Will Professional Services be oddered to the Premier Plus Members? If so, could you tell us more about the services that Print Audit will offer?
West: Premier Plus members will make a ton of money by offering additional professional services above and beyond the standard rollout for SharePoint that we provide. We will help them to develop the professional services packages. Print Audit is in the subscription business, not in the professional services business, and we need to explore a little more to see if we provide them ourselves or not.
Art: Where do you see the sweet spot for your new services? Meaning how many employees should we be looking for in order to present these services?
West: The great thing about NeoStream, unlike other ECM offerings, is that it fits really nicely in the SMB market where most of our Premier members already play.
Art: Will Print Audit be offering toolsets that are prebuilt for the client?
We will be working on a standard NeoStream template for office equipment dealers so they can experience its power for themselves. The cool part is it will bring a tremendous amount of back office and customer facing benefits to the table for Premier Plus members, right within their own businesses.
Art: So what do you see as the billing model? Seat based for subscription portion and then adding professional services to that?
John: Yes, that is the most likely way. Subscription is the way of the future for our space, especially Seat-based. The day of selling people software are disappearing as customers like the continuous support that comes under subscription.
John & West, thank you for the time today. I'm sure many of our members will appreciate this update about the acquisition of NeoStream. Additionally, I love the idea of managing the entire document life cycle.
-=Good Selling=-
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