Network Color Printers Category Profile

This year, printing vendors continued to look to the SMB market for color-printing sales and to tap the channel to reach that market. But one channel newcomer outshined the veterans, according to partners surveyed for the 2006 VARBusiness Annual Report Card (ARC).

In its ARC debut, Ricoh earned the highest overall score (79), bringing an end to Xerox's four-year reign. With a 76, Xerox took the No. 2 spot, a finish fueled by a dramatic increase in its Loyalty scores. But the former champ lost ground in Partnership, where it lagged behind Ricoh by 8 points.

"Xerox makes very good products. They're a very technically proficient company, but they frequently compete with their own channel," says Jeffrey Goldstein, who heads up the imaging and printing business at MCPc, a solution provider based in Cleveland.

Xerox's director of channel marketing, Mark Drum, says the vendor's Partnership and Support scores were "disappointing," and that the company is committed to remedying the problems this year.

The vendor has already begun ramping up its channel efforts, rolling out a cost-per-page service for its partners in August. Under the new program, PagePack, VARs can supply contracts based on how many pages their customers print each month, giving the end user visibility into their costs and relieving the VAR of stocking up on supplies.

Such services represented a trend in the past year as color-printer prices continue to drop and VARs turn to services and solutions for profit.

Meanwhile, Ann Moser, vice president of the printing solution division at Ricoh, continues to lead a multiyear channel recruitment drive, an effort that appears to be paying dividends.

Since launching the initiative, Ricoh has grown its partner base to nearly 800, and the company plans to double that number in 12 months, Moser says. Part of that effort involves beefing up the company's channel-focused staff.

"We had just a small amount of people working in the distribution channel three years ago. Now we have more than 60, and the majority of them are in sales," Moser says.

Yet she acknowledges that Ricoh will have to work hard to keep partners onboard if it wants to stay on the throne in this category.

And despite the importance of vendors' channel efforts, hardware performance remains a top criterion for solution providers rating their partners. In Product Innovation, which takes into account product quality/reliability and ease of integration—to name a few—Ricoh, HP and Xerox were evenly matched. Ricoh and HP scored 79; Xerox received a 78 in overall Product Innovation.

"HP has all the innovation behind them right now," Goldstein says. "The products they have coming out in the next two to eight months are not on the radar at other organizations we've seen."

Meanwhile, Lexmark came in third place with an overall score of 73. The vendor slipped a little in Product Innovation but improved in Support, Partnership and Loyalty.

"I've been in IT for 23 years, and I've never seen any vendor relationships that have yet to extend to the way Lexmark reaches out to its partners," says Mark Brown, CEO and founder of Total Networking Solutions, a VAR in Pennsville, N.J.

Oki Data earned a 71, and Konica/Minolta brought up the rear with a 66. The latter's channel commitment continued to come under question last month, as the company announced it was opening a new direct-sales branch in Richmond, Va., to target the sales of color printers, MFPs and document-workflow solutions in vertical markets.