(L-R): Roly Smoldon, General Manager IT Services and Craig Loveridge, General Manager Sales, Ricoh New Zealand; and Michael Friis, National Sales Manager and Brendan Ward, Partner Business Development Manager, 2degrees
Ricoh New Zealand has joined forced with 2degrees to access internet, WAN and mobile as part of its managed IT services business.
During the past two years, Ricoh has grown its IT offering and required a partner to provide fixed and mobile services that could be scalable and meet its future growth requirements to clients in the SME space.
“Most people don’t think of IT when they think of Ricoh, they think copiers and printers, and that’s a perception we’re actively changing,” says Roly Smoldon, General Manager, Ricoh IT Services.
“Our single supplier offering is a point of difference in the IT space and one of the reasons behind our impressive growth in the sector.
“We needed a partner that could match our growth through their own innovation and investment in the market, and 2degrees fitted the bill.”
From designing and building tailored IT infrastructure to helping businesses journey to the cloud, Ricoh IT Services provides Microsoft Office 365 design migration and licensing, cloud back up, managed voice, managed WAN, managed IT services and hardware and software procurement.
Smoldon says Ricoh’s services have been tailored to New Zealand business.
“Prior to switching to Ricoh our customers typically have anywhere between six to 10 IT suppliers and when something goes wrong they are passed from one supplier to the next,” he adds.
“This wastes time, effort and money, not to mention the adverse impact on the productivity of their staff and their ability to carry out business as usual.
“What we offer is maximum uptime and a single point of contact that our customers can easily access. With the support of 2degrees, our focus is to capitalise on the opportunities provided by the cloud and give our customers a seamless IT experience on all of their devices, be that in or out of the office.”
From a telco perspective, 2degrees Chief Sales Officer Scott Taylor says it is the first time the company has entered into a partnership of this capacity.
“We want to make it easy for medium sized businesses to do what they do best - grow and attract new customers - rather than spend time sorting their IT issues,” he says.
“By choosing Ricoh, businesses will be able to do exactly that and have an expert take care of the rest.”
