Another Big Deal in the MFP World

We're talking about the M&A activity that has taken place in this sector over the past couple years. It now appears that Canon is buying Oce in a deal that is being valued at approximately $1.1 billion. Canon has been under pressure since a buying spree by Ricoh recently culminated in Ricoh acquiring Canon's primary North American reseller partner IKON. Of course, a year earlier, Xerox had picked up another large Canon reseller, in Florida-based Global Imaging Systems.

Not that Oce equates with buying a dealer channel, but Oce does have its own sales force and channel, which will be subsumed into Canon. On the document capture front this deal probably means very little, although Oce does have some digital mailroom products and services it offers its customers. Oce was the former home of the CGK OCR technology, before it sold it to Captaris a couple years ago, as part of its efforts to concentrate further on the output market. Oce, of course, then turned around and developed/licensed new document capture technology to address the digital mailroom. Anyhow, at least Canon was able to buy someone, and Oce does have some pretty good stuff in its portfolio.

Ralph

Kofax releases Q1 statement

Kofax has released a statement regarding its fiscal first-quarter  (ended Sept. 30) numbers that sounds fairly positive to us. Apparently the distribution business continues to struggle but the software numbers seem acceptable. Here's CEO Reynolds Bish's statement:

"I’m pleased to report that we made good progress and performed better than expected in our software business this past quarter. Market conditions have stabilized and show early signs of improving to a limited extent but continue to be challenging and difficult to predict. As a result and excluding the effect of the 170 Systems acquisition, which should contribute approximately $22m of revenues after acquisition accounting, we continue to expect low to mid single digit organic revenue growth in our software business this financial year.”

Upcoming industry events

Here's a few we just posted on our Web site.

Let me know if there are anymore you'd like me to post.

Ralph