Xerox Unveils Revamped Partner Program, Personalized Application Builder

Xerox Tuesday took the wraps off two new offerings designed to strengthen its channel business. First, Xerox unveiled its remodeled Partner Program, which the company said will provide a 30 percent increase in partner benefits.

Some of those benefits include enhanced pre-sales support and virtual product demonstrations; product migration tools; automated email campaigns; and a new SmartPad app that allows partners to present and share sales content via their iPad and Android tablets. "We want to grow our partner business and engage new partners," said Douraid Zaghouani, president of Channel Partner Operations at Xerox. "We're building off a great 2013. We had an excellent year in the channel, and we want to do even more business this year."

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Zaghouani said Xerox looked at all of the different programs and offerings for its global channel business to create a unified, holistic partner program for all partner business models and geographies. The new program is designed to help solution providers -- whether they're resellers, or managed services or cloud providers -- expand and simplify their Xerox business. Along with increasing partner benefits, the new global partner program has brought together a large number of channel sales and marketing campaigns under one roof and made them available to all partners.

"We saw a sixfold increase in the new campaigns available to partners," said Toni Clayton-Hine, vice president of Global Marketing and Value Proposition for Xerox’s Channel Partner Operations. Clayton-Hine also said the vendor has made a multimillion-dollar investment for the revamped global partner program, which includes a new partner relationship management (PRM) system and SmartCentre partner portal.

Ben Johnson, founder and CEO of Liberty Technology, a Xerox partner based in Griffin, Ga., said he welcomes the new partner program changes as an MSP and managed print service provider. "It's taken Xerox some time to adjust their business and their partner program around the managed services model, but they've worked pretty hard to help us build in more recurring revenue and become stickier with our clients," Johnson said.

Second, to help bolster that recurring revenue model and appeal more to MSPs, Xerox also introduced its Personalized Application Builder, a new system that allows partners to customize and brand software solutions around document management and managed print services. The Personalized Application Builder includes tools like AppStudio, a site to create, install, license and manage Xerox ConnectKey Apps, and software development kits for products like Xerox FreeFlow workflow software. Xerox said the Personalized Application Builder was designed to help partners, specifically MSPs, add more value on top of their services. "Our objective is to empower partners," Zaghouani said. "We want to help them take the next step in building their revenue stream."

Clayton-Hine said the benefit to Xerox partners goes beyond delivering personalized applications to individual customers. "Partners get to brand that solution as their own," she said. "And regardless of where you are in the developer landscape, you can use these apps and tap into our expertise."

PUBLISHED MARCH 18, 2014