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Monday, November 16, 2009

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

2 comments:

Davis Business Machines said...
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Anonymous said...

As a Canon channel partner, we are VERY excited to see Canon and Oce join forces to provide industry leading technology to the marketplace!