MFP Weekend Industry Notes

Gathered from Print4Pay Hotel Members from around the world and a few moles in very good places!

- Gartner, based on survey, states that by the year 2012, 20% of businesses won’t own any of their own IT assets. This includes servers, PCs and software. Businesses will turn to leasing, employee ownership and cloud computing. The reason is that companies are moving to use operational budgets instead of capital budgets to upgrade their IT infrastructure.

- DocuWare of Germany, maker of popular document management, announced it will spend $1.45 million to develop web-based solutions.

- Ricoh launched a new production color system, called the PRO C720 system offering:
- Slowed down, cheaper version of the slow selling C900
- Offers a top speed of 72ppm versus 90ppm of the C900
- Maximum duty cycle of only 320K/month
- Runs at same speed, regardless of paper weight, like the C900, up to 110lb. cover
- Uses same EFI Fiery as C900
- finishing options are limited to saddle stitch booklet maker and standard finisher

- Ricoh apparently will be reselling large format color inkjet printers from Epson.

- Large medical firm sued for violations of health data security law, known as HIPAA act:
- Health Net of Connecticut Inc. was sued by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal
- Sued for violations of HIPAA privacy and security rules
- Large breach of identifiable medical records and Social Security numbers
- It was reported that hard drive disappeared in May, 2009
- The hard drive contained health information on 1.5 million members, including 446,000 in Connecticut
- The data was not encrypted

- On Demand Books, LLC, announced it is now offering a new version of its Espresso Book Machine, which can produce a 300 page paperback book in less than 4 minutes. The new model uses the engine from a Xerox 4112 b/w production system.

- Open Text Corp., maker of document management/search/retrieval software, announced that it is boosting its - business process automation by adding next-generation document recognition:
- called Capture Center version 4.0
- formerly known as Captaris DOKuStar
- includes numerous recognition modules
- machine and hand print recognition
- optical character and intelligent character recognition
- magnetic ink recognition

- Toshiba announced a new option for its color MFPs, the eBRIDGE Color Profiler Tool featuring:
- Works with ES1000 spectrophotometer ($1299)
- Software that enables the creation of ICC device output profiles
- Target Reader creates characterization data files used to build custom color profiles
- Data Viewer allows end user to view character data in several ways
- Profile Builder initiates construction of the ICC profile
- Profile Viewer assists in verifying the integrity of the ICC profile
- ICC stands for International Color Consortium, a standard in color management
- Base MSRP of $499 for software
- Provides color management, without owning an EFI Fiery

- In an interview with Hewlett Packard’s Director of Commercial & Enterprise Printing, Mr. Samir Shah, stated:
- “There is a tremendous opportunity for color, especially since the technology is becoming affordable”
- “Our second priority is to take AIO and MFD portfolio to the next level. Going forward, you will witness a lot of innovation and initiatives from HP in this regard. The market for MFDs is just the tip of the iceberg. We want not only to grow marketshare, but also grow the market base.”
- “The third priority is around the toner business and evangelizing the value propositions of original toner. The science behind toner technology is not understood by many. Our intent is to take it closer to the customer.”
- “Fourth is to ensure that our channels are up to date in terms of technology. We also want to arm them will all the possible ammunition to enable them to grow their business”
- “We are working on launching a TCO (total cost of ownership) calculator”

- Hewlett Packard & Microsoft announced a three year, $250 million partnership. Details:
- Cuts across sales, engineering and marketing
- Bundled products aimed at small business
- Will be delivering a next-generation data warehouse, which bundles tens of servers and can hold hundreds of terabytes of data

- According to Von Hansen, a VP with Hewlett Packard, the company will be reselling a total of 34 different Canon copiers in the year 2010.

- HP’s CEO, Mark Hurd, received a total of $24.2 million in pay during 2009.

- Xeikon, a division of Punch of Belgium, announced it has appointed John Blumsack, as Vice President of Sales, to increase its sales of production color systems.

- A former copier dealer pleaded guilty to using bogus copier leases to scam area businesses and nonprofits. Scott Arthur Waddell of Raleigh, NC, pleaded guilty in federal court to fraud. He will be sentenced later and faces up to 20 years in prison. Waddell ran two companies, Modern Office Solutions and PST Consultants. Investigators said he created a web of forged documents, including copier leases and credit applications, to scan area businesses and nonprofits.

- Google threatened to shut down its China operations after a cyberattack on its infrastructure. According to Google:
- the attack was coordinated and focused on 20 large companies
- aim of attack was to et the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists
- attack also focused on U.S., China and Europe based Gmail accounts that supported human rights in China

- OfficeMax announced it will offer in-house paper shredding:
- $0.59 per pound for first 5lbs.
- $0.49 per pound for next 5lbs.
- $0.39 per pound for 11 pounds or more

- Equitrac announced it will receive an investment of $16 million from Brookside Mezzanine Partners.

- Law firms are concerned about the cost to store and retrieve case data.
- Collecting the data, processing, and staging it for review, and then reviewing it for privilege
can be costly.
- One large data producer calculated that these steps can cost between $5000 and $7000
per gigabyte of data.
- A typical midsize case could comprise 500 gigabytes of data
- 26% of law firms state that preproduction privilege review consumed between 20% and 50% of their litigation budgets annually.

- Fujitsu of Japan announced that it is entering negotiations with Sagem of France in regards to 3G mobile telecommunication services.

- Ashley Hawkins of Benwood, West Virginia, was arrested by police after she attempted to make a purchase at a local gas station using a fake $20 bill she made using a color copier.

- Samsung of Korea has decided to settle out of court with Kodak, which had sued the company regarding Kodak’s digital camera patents.

- Canon announced that in the year 2010, it will celebrate 20 years of recycling toner cartridges, in Japan, China, France and Virginia.

- Canon announced the following appointments:
- Kunihiko Tedo is now Senior CP and GM of Finance & Accounting
- Yuichi Ishizuka is now Executive VP of Consumer Imaging Group
- Eliott Peck is now Senior VP of Consumer Imaging Group
- Junichi Yo****ake is now Senior VP of Imaging Systems Group

- Office Depot announced results of a survey:
- 30% report having lost an important document due to a messy desk
- The most likely items to cause workspace clutter were:
- 32% = food
- 31% = coffee cups
- 12% = spare shoes
- Most common problems caused by disorganization were:
- 47% = lost time
- 16% = meeting tardiness
- 14% = missed deadlines

- According to IDC, business analytics software-as-a-service (SaaS) market will grow more than three times as fast as the total business analytics software market with a compound annual growth rate of 22.4% through 2013.

- Panasonic announced it is aiming for a total of $100 billion in sales per year by March of 2013. The company plans to announce detailed business plans for the next three years in May, after reviewing business overlaps and potential synergies between it and Sanyo, which it just acquired. (unknown if it will discuss its plans for its digital copier division)

- The National Conference on Weights and Measures plans to take up the issue of inkjet cartridge labeling at its meeting in January in Nashville, TN. Printer makers are expected to fight potential plans to force them to put labels on the boxes stating how much actual ink is contained in the cartridge.

- Toshiba announced it will now offer its dealers refurbished Hewlett Packard and Lexmark printer parts, to lower their costs to support managed print services programs. The parts are supplied by Depot America.


- The Managed Print Services Association gave out its MPS Leadership Award Winners for 2009:
- Nationwide Insurance for “Corporate MPS Implementation”
- LaserNetworks won for “MPS Vendor of the Year” (owner is Chris Sloate)
- PrintFleet won for “Infrastructure Component Provider”
- Supplies Network won for “MPS Infrastructure Logistical Provider”

- Law Technology magazine gave out 6 awards to Autonomy Corp. for its document management software for law firms.

- According to some industry analysts, Samsung and Sony are going to invest $3 billion to start a joint venture.

- Okidata announced it will relabel the Konica Minolta magicolor 1690MF desktop color laser AIO, and call it the Okidata MC160.

- Agilysys Inc. won a bid to supply document management software to Royal Caribbean International Cruise Lines in Miami, FL.

- According to Forrester Research, tech spending (including MFPs) in the U.S. will grow 6.6% in 2010, after being down 8.2% in 2009. “The technology downturn of 2008 and 2009 is unofficially over” said Andrew Bartels of Forrester.

-=Good Selling=-