Ricoh New Zealand is stepping up its managed services business, with a new partnership with 2degrees.

Roly Smoldon, Ricoh IT Services general manager, says most people don't think IT when they think of Ricoh, instead focusing on the legacy copier and printer business, but the company is ‘a challenger brand that is breaking new ground for customers' and actively changing the old perceptions.

The partnership with 2degrees – the first of its kind for the telco – will see 2degrees providing internet, WAN and mobile as part of Ricoh's managed IT services business.

“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,” Smoldon says.

“We needed a partner who could match our growth through their own innovation and investment in the market, and 2degrees fitted the bill.

Ricoh launched its IT services division in 2011, with John King at the helm initially ramping up in recent years to offer a fixed price managed service to monitor, maintain and fix servers, network and end user systems tailored for New Zealand businesses.

The company's services include Office 365 design migration and licensing, cloud backup, managed voice, managed WAN, managed IT services and hardware and software procurement.

Ricoh says in the last two years it has rapidly grown its IT offerings and needed a partner to provide fixed and mobile services that could be scalable and meet its future growth requirements to clients in the SME space.

Smoldon says with the support of 2degrees, Ricoh IT Services' focus is to capitalise on the opportunities provided by cloud and give customers a seamless IT experience on all devices, in and out of the office.

Scott Taylor, 2degrees chief sales officer, dubs the new partnership ‘a fantastic pairing' and says it ties in with the telco's desire to ‘make it easy for medium businesses to do what they do best – grow and attract new customers – rather than spend time sorting their IT issues'.