Q&A: Xerox's New Head Of U.S. Channels On How Company Split Will Affect Partners

Channel Growth Opportunity?

Darren Cassidy, Xerox's new president of U.S. channels, is looking at the company's upcoming split as an opportunity to refocus its place in the channel, ambitiously looking to make it bigger and more focused.

Cassidy said he wants to focus on the "blurring lines" between IT and print as an opportunity to grow Xerox's channel and provide current customers new opportunities, adding that with new applications and technology, Xerox is looking to expand its channel to new areas and markets.

Cassidy, who joined Xerox in 2002, was announced as the new head of U.S. channels in early January, only weeks before the company announced its split. Previously, he was managing director of Xerox U.K., and before that led the company’s global managed print services business.

After the split, one of the two businesses will focus on helping clients outsource business processes such as accounting and HR; the other will focus on printing services and digitalizing paper documents.

CRN recently sat down with Cassidy to talk about what he’s hearing from Xerox partners about the split and what Xerox wants to do with its channel.

Xerox announced your appointment six days after the company announced it will be splitting. How are you moving into your position with that sort of news?

Internally, in our business, it is a really interesting time and we are very excited. The channel organization has now just become an even more important strategy within an $11 billion technology business.

From that perspective, the conversations that we are having now with our partners about their importance are much more centered around a very aggressive strategy. I am thinking about how we can use this split to grow our business, drive more penetration and play with a wider set of partners.

In your conversations with partners, how have they responded to the announcement of the split?

Already we feel a difference.

I was really interested to go and test the temperature out with our partners and see whether or not we need to help them settle down. But they see it the same as we do. The ones that have worked for us a while seem really excited and, candidly, they are excited to see more focus on the services side.

They are now already seeing a very exciting future as a bigger part of the technology business.

So, all the feedback I have had - literally 100 percent - has been one of excitement.

Have you come up against concerns about the split?

One bit of feedback that I have had was partners equating our split to the experience of what HP's split was like. … Partners who did a lot of work with HP, and saw the split there said it was difficult. And they asked if this process will be as difficult with us, and actually, the split with us is a very different thing.

We have operated our technology business very separately from our services business. HP was connected in many ways: around its server business, its application business, its print business and its imaging business in ways that we are not.

So, it was … quite refreshing for us to hear that we are not set up that way and therefore our partners aren't going to feel anything other than renewed focus and energy from the technology side of the business.

What is your first priority as you move into this position?

We have an unbelievable set of channel partners that serve us well and they are fiercely loyal. They operate all across the U.S. and in many different parts of the market.

We need to make sure that we are supporting them, creating value with and for them and we need to make sure we are helping them drive performance to their clients so that we can get the benefit from them as their partner.

So, it is quite a deliberate focus on how to help the partners that we have do more of their work better and smarter.

How do you plan on doing that?

We talk about technology apps, solutions, services. We ask questions like "How do we help these partners go on a journey of value creation?"

I think when you talk about where you come from with your different businesses; there within lies one of the opportunities and challenges.

We have lots of partners that worked in a market and a domain in a reasonably set way for a long period.

Now, the world of IT partners and the world of print-based or copier-based partners are starting to merge in different ways and we are actually starting to unlock that as an opportunity as opposed to seeing that as something to fear. It is where we are spending quite a lot of time.

How do you plan on taking this message to partners that have been looking at their business in one dimension for such a long time?

One of the things that struck me coming over here is the fierce loyalty that we have in our channels, the passion to see success and frankly for us to succeed as well. That is something you don’t see elsewhere.

With that passion comes an incredible amount of collaboration, and there is more of it now in this space than there has ever been in our past. It is great.

A good example of this is: One of the partners in the U.S. created an app that basically does remote firmware upgrades. Now, thanks to the App Gallery [Xerox's version of an app store, which is made for app-enabled multi-function printers], every single partner in the U.S. has the opportunity to take that and use it, even though it comes from another partner. … . But, again, it is that collaboration and that willingness to share that is a huge value for us.

Are you looking to expand your channel?

We need different types of channel partners in selected areas and in different market types.

With this type of technology change, and our focus on apps, solutions and services, we want to be playing in many more areas in the market.

How do you plan on expanding your channel?

We are working really hard to look at how we enable more partners to work with us. We don’t want to go "big bang" and bring massive numbers; our process is very selective and very deliberate, but it is a key part of our strategy.

I can tell you that through this ConnectKey platform the conversation is a clear differentiator with the types of partners that we want to talk to that need great equipment but want more from the vendors as they start to bridge into IT and other domains.

What is the game plan for getting those specific partners there?

Well it’s multi-faceted and it depends.

But we have a strong pipeline for partners that we have been adding to for a while.

We are working with distribution to expand our reach into their more transactional partners through a lot of marketing, demand generation and campaign work.

And we are using service providers, big and small, and looking through sources that we can enable through managed print, managed data and IT services.

As the stack that clients are asked to look at starts to expand, all the value that they can see starts to change.

We also have an entire application development community that really (has) an ability to bring together these different organizations that, frankly, think differently to some of our traditional channels.

What other objectives do you have as you start this position?

It is not unconnected to my other goals, but we need to dominate in the print-based services space - including managed print services.

We already have the lion's market share, and we have the best platform, the best offers and the best technology. Now, with apps and software linked in between we have never been better placed to go and grab the sort of (market) share that we have in our large enterprise accounts in our channels base.

We have very lofty ambitions in that space to go and really dominate the channel world.

We are doing okay at the movement, but we can do and we need to do a lot better.

How important is it for Xerox to seriously focus on its channel now?

It is really important because the market is already starting to transition from managed print to managed data and managed services workflow automation. The things that we have been talking about … are bringing those worlds closer together again and we think we have a big play to leverage the footprint and capabilities that we have.

What does Xerox offer the channel that is unique?

We have the tools, the platform and the approach that we use to deliver (managed print services) to our largest global clients and we have made them available to our channel. Our channel can use them in an open and unique set of models that give us flexibility to work in the way that each of our channel partners want to work with our MPS suite. Nobody else has done that.