IKON Acquisition

How about this? Digital copier/printer manufacturer Ricoh purchases arch rival Canon's top reseller IKON. This is part of a growing trend of copier manufacturers purchasing dealer channels. With these channels also representing one of the fastest growing channels for document imaging software, it will be interesting to watch the relatively conservative hardware manufacturers merge with the more progressive document imaging ISVs.

The IKON deal represents probably the largest acquisition yet by a hardware vendor of a dealer. IKON is more than twice the size of Global Imaging, which was acquired by Xerox last year. Also, vendors like Sharp and Toshiba have been acquiring smaller North American dealers over the past few years, Sharp only recently accelerating its activity in this area.

Of course, the big question is, where does the IKON acquisition leave Canon, which for years has been IKON's primary hardware vendor. Ricoh and HP have begun to figure more heavily into the IKON mix in recent years, but Canon was still the primary vendor. Canon, which has been the North American market leader in MFP units shipped will be hard pressed to replace this channel as it moves to Ricoh.

Meadville Copier Dealer Honored

I thought this was pretty neat. A couple years ago, I did a presentation in Meadville on document management for a locally-based state economic development group-eBizITPA. This Hagan Business Machines had like seven people show up. Now they are being honored by Toshiba for the innovative work. Good work guys.

Two Recent Distributed Capture Wins

Here's one from Kodak with its ScanStation at Kaiser Permamente. What's cool about this is that not only is it a distributed capture win, but it's an installation of multiple networked scanners. Kaiser and the Kodak reseller went with the version of the ScanStation that includes NSi AutoStore, which is a very useful distributed capture software application.

Of course, Oracle, which acquired Web-based capture pioneer Captovation this spring, also recently landed this huge deal with JP Morgan Chase. We're talking potentially 3,000 users by the end of next year. That's clearly starting to get to some of the potential of this stuff.

Ralph