D&H Offers Partners Document Dominance With Fujitsu Deal

D&H Distributing has joined with Fujitsu Computer Products of America to offer partners a line of sophisticated scanners that it says will keep them competitive in the as-a-service arena by giving them a new line of document management business.

“For us, it’s part of an ongoing strategy to provide two things to our customers,” Peter DiMarco, vice president of VAR sales at Harrisburg, Pa.-based D&H Distributing, told CRN. “One is to continue to build out the everything-as-a-service portfolio, and secondly to provide solutions that help VARs power SMBs to be more productive.”

D&H signed an agreement with Fujitsu Computer Products of America, a front-runner in the scanner industry, through which D&H will carry select models of Fujitsu’s line of desktop scanners, including the company’s flagship ScanSnap iX1500 duplex scanner and the iX500 color scanner with Nuance PDF management software.

“We’re able to leverage their brand in the marketplace as well as help them capitalize on SMB, which is something that they’ve come to us for,” DiMarco said. “Many SMBs are struggling with how do they scan documents, when do they scan documents? Where do they scan documents to whether it’s an on premise storage solution or a cloud solution like Dropbox? Now we can provide a total solution, their scanning solutions as well as on-premise storage, and then cloud storage as well. So we’re really excited about the partnership.”

DiMarco said the advanced embedded software is one of the reasons D&H partnered with Fujitsu. He said applications such as ScanSnap as well as Nuance increase the product’s ease of use. The Nuance software provided with the iX500 scanner allows workers to generate, convert, edit, sign, and securely share PDF files. These hosted functions make the Fujitsu scanners, along with the included document scanning software, a sought-after offering for the connected office, he said. This partnership gives solution providers a way to give customers an “end-to-end data management and digital support,” adding another layer to their service offering, he said.

“In some cases, the MSP will actually scan all the documents for them,” DiMarco said. “Many of them have help desk and technical employees on-site, so scanning could be part of what they do with the right security measures. That’s one way. The other thing is to be able to scan all the documents, manage and monitor them, be able to restore them, this gets layered into their profit margin that they charge to end customers on a monthly basis.”

A great deal of the demand for this service is coming from industries with strict compliance and regulatory requirements, however, he said even a small business that is still in the midst of its digital transformation could be a customer.

“Demand is significant,” he said. “Think of an auto shop that does everything manually, and has hundreds of invoices a day, and has customers sign on them every day. What do they do with them? Where do they get scanned? Those types of activities are really important to SMBs today.”

He said partners who sign up will get robust support from D&H.

“The other gap that we’ve seen is for many of our smaller partners, while they know Fujitsu is a great brand in the marketplace, they have not been able to get the coverage from Fujitsu and their peers because they’re smaller partners,” DiMarco said. “That’s where we come in. We provide coverage. We provide support for SMB VARs that the Fujitsus of the world are not able to get to.”