SYNAXON has grown quickly thanks to its focus on helping to make its resellers and MSPs customers’ lives easier through things like SYNAXON Hub. The company aims to make its partners’ lives even easier with the upcoming launch of SYNAXON Managed Services.
It was late martial artist Bruce Lee who once said “simplicity is the key to brilliance”. Granted, he wasn’t thinking of the IT channel when he uttered those words, but they nonetheless have a relevance to resellers and managed service providers (MSPs) operating today.
“What everybody wants to do is to make their life easier,” says Markus Rex, head of SYNAXON Managed Services. “Whatever makes it smoother, easier and more integrated is highly appreciated and in demand.”
This includes integrating hardware and software providers, so customers deal with fewer companies when invoicing or sorting out any issues they may have. “Simplicity is the key,” says Markus.
It is this approach that informs SYNAXON Hub. “Our customer-first approach is very important and everything in SYNAXON Hub is built around making life easy for the partners,” says Mike Barron, managing director, SYNAXON UK. “For example, we help resellers making bids to vendors. That’s quite a difficult and potentially long process in distribution. But we simplify that. Even just having somebody be available on the phone, as simple as it sounds, that’s what we try and do. Everything is built to make the journey for the reseller as easy as possible.”
This has driven the growth of SYNAXON Hub in the past year. “We’ve put some very aggressive targets in for this year, and we think we can we can reach those,” says Mike. “SYNAXON Hub has really found its place in the market. Resellers, vendors and distributors all get it. They’ve embraced it and are invested in what we’re doing, and they’re helping it to grow.”
The UK SYNAXON business also has the power of its German parent behind it. In the past year, the UK operation has been brought more in line with its European counterpart to help create stronger consistency across brands, which has also helped it to grow.
This has contributed to an overall positive first half of the year for SYNAXON, which has also included adding several new vendor partners including ASUS, Acer and APC alongside existing partners such as Dell, HP and Lenovo. “One of the highlights of the first half of the year was winning an award from Lenovo, which meant we were one of the five fastest growing partners in EMEA,” says Mike.
Channel assessment
This growth has come against the background of a wider channel that is facing various challenges. “The enterprise space is performing strongly with data centres, hyperscalers, cloud, cybersecurity and AI-driven solutions all performing well,” says Mike.
“The SMB market has been more mixed. A lot of cost pressures and vendor price increases have posed quite a challenge. Of course, AI has also had an influence. All that has created a bit of hesitation in the market and has perhaps delayed the go-ahead on some planned projects. But there is still activity in the smaller end of the market – including some Windows 11 refresh still coming through and driving sales – and we’ve put things in place to mitigate those challenges and we’re ensuring we’re meeting our customers’ demands.”
Mike adds that AI will have an increasing role, especially as more end customers get to grips with what it can do. “Everyone’s got a lot to learn about AI. Future conversations are going to be around helping people to understand why they need an AI PC a lot more than they do now.”
Markus agrees: “Is the hardware capability that’s in AI PCs used to its fullest potential as we speak here in June 2026? Definitely not,” he says. “Will this remain the case over the three-to-five-year lifecycle of the device? No. Once something like AI is there, people will start to use it and that creates more opportunity in the channel.”
But increasing use of AI also means increasing cybersecurity risks. “There’s a bunch of sophisticated solutions being made available by vendors, which I think are going to remediate some of the challenges that have been out there over the last two years,” says Markus. “Now vendors are thinking, ‘how can we make this easier, more consumable, how can we make sure that we provide a comprehensive shield and interaction between solutions?’ We have the advantage that the cybersecurity industry is so used to doing these things at a rapid pace, but I personally have never seen it develop this fast before.”
While cybersecurity is the top priority, sustainability continues to be an increasing focus. Markus notes in Germany, where sustainability practices are generally more embedded than in the UK, it does play a major role and SYNAXON works with recycling companies to make the recycling process as smooth as possible to help partners meet their sustainability needs.
“We are also seeing anything that reduces power consumption – given that the price of electricity is quite high in Germany – is seen as a fantastic plus. Personally, I wish this would be for sustainability reasons although I fear it’s just for wallet reasons, but I’ll take it.”
The UK picture is similar, with increasing focus on reducing power consumption, adds Mike. “We partner with vendors that offer a sustainability programme,” he says. “We promote those programmes to our partners including recycling elements and refurbishing devices. A lot of tenders we see now from our partners have an element of sustainability. You have to offer and to be seen to be offering that element when submitting tenders. Sustainability is taken seriously and we embrace it and promote it as much as we can.”
Managed services
Again, simplicity is key to sustainability initiatives. Making things simpler will also be at the heart of SYNAXON’s managed services offering, which will be launched in the UK this summer. “We’re excited about this,” says Mike. “The aim of SYNAXON Managed Services is to give partners a platform to help them grow, to look at more recurring revenue and profitable opportunities and to support their customers more effectively as well.
“Our platform will enable them to bring everything into one platform. There’s a saying in Germany that 10 platforms is nine too many. We’re trying to simplify things and remove the barriers to commitment as well. A lot of big vendors have large commitment policies. We’ll take the commitments on and then the MSPs can come in and buy what they need without having to worry about that volume commitment.”
Mike adds that SYNAXON term themselves as a ‘master MSP’ – being an MSP for an MSP, giving customers the resources they need to help with their pain points and provide a better service to their own customers. “It is focused on being customer first, listening to what they need and then helping them simplify and deliver for that to enable them to grow faster.”
Markus adds that SYNAXON Managed Services has been available in Germany for some years already. “We have well over 750 partners using it,” he says. “We have a 35-people team supporting that effort, which will also be standing behind the UK’s offering. It’s a bilingual team. We designed it from the get-go that we wanted to be able to roll this out in the UK as well.
“At the moment we’re invoicing more than 250,000 SKUs every month. We see these macro trends in the partners, such as the difficulty of finding skilled people, so if the solution is easier, it’s easier for them to serve their customers. There are more customers’ needs coming in and being channelled into the channel, for lack of a better word.
“We are signing up on an average every month between 10 and 20 new partners to SYNAXON Managed Services. I’m happy that we are now in the position to expand this offering in the UK.
“It is very partner-centric. It’s targeted at the smaller end of the market – MSPs with between one and 25 employees, where it really matters that you have somebody can help you and stand behind you and make your life easier. That’s what we saw crystallise itself out in Germany. Given the number of partners, we have a pretty good understanding of what the markets require. The UK market is a bit ahead compared to Germany when it comes to managed services prevalence, but all our discussions with partners indicates that the demands and needs from the end customers put through those partners are the same.”
Markus adds the time is right to launch this service. “Our overarching theme is we want things to make things easier for our partners,” he says. “The life of partners is complicated enough. We don’t want to add to the complication. Anything we can do to make life easier and to establish ourselves as the easy-to-work-with guys is good. We have large teams here, and we can provide significant value to the UK channel.”
