Xerox Annual Partner Conference

Xerox recently held it’s annual partner conference where they brought together the production and office solutions partners for the first time. Last year Xerox made significant shifts to their business by internally combining their office and production groups breaking down these silos of their business. With that change also came bringing two separate partner groups together, office and production as one business unit. Leading this new group is Elizabeth Fox, Vice President, Solutions Business Team. The conference on the partner side consisted of about 1/3 production peripheral/accessories companies, 1/3 production solutions and 1/3 office solutions vendors. Xerox personnel consisted of partner program members and various sales organizations from around the world. Read more »

European debt resulting in different speeds of economic recovery

Wherever I go at the moment I hear cautious optimism regarding the European economy and the prospects for business in 2010. Nevertheless there seems to be something troubling people, a sense of unease despite the positive sentiments. A couple of weeks ago someone went as far as suggesting they were seeing a multi-speed recovery in Europe; some markets picking up - others remaining severely challenged.

Today, I thought I’d take the bull by the horns, go one step further and openly talk about the enormous elephant in the room – DEBT.

OK, so I’ve said it – what now? Read more »

Open Text Analyst Event

I had the opportunity to attend the Open Text Analyst Event in Boston on January 13th. This annual event provides Open Text the opportunity to share their current marketing and product strategy plans.  The event format seemed to follow others I have attended as well as past Open Text events (there were no show stoppers or game changing announcements this time around). Open Text provided information to the hungry analysts by way of plenty of powerpoint to chew on in the morning session.  The sound of laptops and tablets tapping away (I chose old school pen and composition notebook) was the background hum to each presenter.  The executive team, some of which are relatively new to Open Text, each presented their area of expertise and built upon the last digging slightly deeper as we went along . In an effort to change the tone (and maybe to push back the post luncheon yawns),  the afternoon provided a “speed-dating” (we all joked about it) atmosphere, sitting with select members of the executive team for short bursts of time.

If you don’t know who Open Text is, they are a multi-national company that manages content for hundreds of brands (BMW, Sony, Citibank, Pfizer and Coca Cola just to name a few) and states more than 100 million users in over 50,000 deployments worldwide. So if you don’t know Open Text, you certainly know the companys whose content they support.  And there is no shortage of content, content that is growing exponentially every day, in fact there is an explosion of content from email, text, social media, traditional business applications, newspapers, video, music and books.

Open Text is essentially an ECM vendor and over the years has amassed many different brands including: Vignette, Hummingbird, LiveLink and Captaris to bolster its position and portfolio. Acquiring many discrete businesses has been no small endeavor and in fact has taken time to rationalize under one “Suite” or umbrella offering. Open Text demonstrated how the suite will serve all layers of the enterprise experience from the user level to process level integration and to the base library level. It remains to be seen just how successful this unified message will carry, Open Text themselves admits a lower than preferred penetration into existing customers

And how is Open Text innovating for the future…by learning to play the game Halo…no seriously, Tom Jenkins, Open Text Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer, shared with us his newly acquired skill as a gamer, this Jenkins admits, provides him the ability to truly understand how this next generation consumes content digitally, and their expectation of the digital experience…it was probably fun too!

Expect Open Text to go deep this year…to the heart of the customer, the heart of their own business all with a focus on innovation and mobility.

Canon to Acquire Océ

Today, Canon Inc. (trading symbol CAJ) announced a public cash offer for all the shares of Océ (trading symbol OCE).  Canon intends to make an offer of € 8.60 per Share (cum dividend) for 100% of the outstanding Shares of Océ, representing a premium of 70% over Océ’s closing share price of Friday 13 November 2009 and 137% to the average share price over the last 12 months, this makes the deal worth about 1.1 billion dollars.

In the wake of other major acquisitions in the last year, particularly Ricoh’s acquisition of IKON, there has been much speculation about what Canon will do. Now that Canon has agreed to acquire Océ, it is clear that one of its strategic options has been selected. Read more »

If you think you know Kofax…think again

Kofax recently wrapped up their annual conference – Transform 2009 in San Diego, California. With over 425 in attendance, this audience was a mixture of partners, vendors and end-users. Kofax, founded in 1985, has undergone nothing short of a complete overhaul in the last 18 months. Most changes are thanks to CEO, Reynolds Bish. Bish, former founder of Captiva, spent his first few months with the company identifying many areas in need of serious modification and then went about implementing this revolution of strategic business change.

One of the first major initiatives was to change the name – formerly DICOM group plc, to Kofax. Meant to eliminate confusion with the brands, and quite frankly bring about global synergy among the disparate business units (which according to Bish was sorely lacking), hence the Kofax name was adopted in February 2008.

Next, Bish set out to renovate the management team, making several changes to business unit heads and senior sales staff. The majority of these changes, according to Bish, were to bring experience and leadership to a company that was operating quite separate.

One of the most interesting announcements from Kofax came in September with the acquisition of 170 Systems. A leading provider of financial process automation software, the Markview suite of products provides invoice processing and workflow functionality.  This acquisition could provide a turnkey A/P solution from a single provider, Kofax.

It became clear that Kofax has been busy…Transform was an appropriate event theme this year. Companies that can demonstrate agility and flexibility will ultimately survive and prosper. Arguably an enormous task, not without consequence and fallout, Kofax has seemingly positioned themselves to address the market, and customer needs with product and services.

Kofax Corporate Mission – To be the leading provider of
document driven business process automation solutions

Nuance acquires eCopy

Nuance has completed an acquisition of eCopy. Apparently inked on September 30th, the Nuance acquisition shouldn’t be surprising in this rather accelerated time of consolidation. In fact it seems compression in our industry is hitting a fever pitch these days with acquisition news abound. We ponder on a daily basis, who is next, what makes sense, and who can afford to acquire whom?

Read more »

Toshiba Dealer Summit

Toshiba – Committed to Your Success

InfoTrends recently attended one of two regional events for Toshiba America Business Solutions Inc.  July 28th in Jersey City, NJ. The event was a mixture of channel partners, software, supply and services vendors and analysts. Toshiba took this opportunity to discuss their company and division’s performance as well as to make some announcements regarding new initiatives regarding MPS, solutions, products and programs. Some of the announcements to come out of the meeting were:

• A new branding campaign, and redesigned website
• Product introductions – 9 new monochrome models with emphasis on ecology and security
• A multi-tiered software strategy designed to aid dealers in positioning solutions
• Additions to the software product portfolio – Prism Software’s “desk” series of products
• New partners announcements – Pharos Systems, Fasoo
• Enhancements to the Encompass MPS program – PageSmart series of options
• A newly inked agreement with HP to offer their line of printer and MFP products

Toshiba remained confident about the future of the industry and took this opportunity to once again squelch rumors of a buyout. Dealers left with assurances to the commitment level Toshiba has to its products, programs and services and of course, its channel.

HP Bets on Ben Stein (and Managed Print Services)

HP made several Managed Print Services (MPS) announcements this morning, including a Printing Payback Guarantee — official site here. The announcement took place live from a former U.S. Mint in San Francisco and was moderated by comedian and economist Ben Stein.

When you peel back the layers, HP is effectively guaranteeing that they’ll save you what they say they’ll save you (through MPS assessments). Barring large shifts in volume or print needs, MPS is generally billed as a flat monthly rate or cost-per-click; contracted over 3-5 years; and laden with pretty hefty Service Level Agreement (SLA) language. That said, the onus is often on a provider to deliver on the cost-containment promises of their proposal anyway.

Outside the marketing-speak, then, is the more important point — HP assessments will reveal significant cost saving opportunities, and HP is committed to delivering on them. InfoTrends’ studies show average cost-savings of 20%-25% across several studies, and HP’s guarantee validates these benefits. Particularly in context of the recession — a recurring theme throughout HP’s Webcast — organizations will look to these managed services benefits.

Under-discussed was the HP PagePlan program, which actually seems to be the more novel announcement. For customers “not yet ready for MPS,” PagePlan offers services, supplies, and support for HP devices. Bundled into these deals are also solutions for secure printing and job accounting, two of the most adjacent solutions to printing and print management.

The Elusive Software Pull-Through?

It started when I saw the open-source model gain momentum in the content management space a la Alfresco, Drupal, Joomla, Nuxeo, and several others. The no-license model clearly had potential, especially given the associated services and support revenue streams we were seeing. In fact, my own (commercial) ECM market numbers indicated that license revenues were typically less than 1/3 of large deals anyway. Fast-forward.

Early this month, on an earnings call with HP, our hosts implicated that they’re playing in a “free license” market. Their competition was giving away software, they claimed, to capture coveted services and support revenue streams across a contract. Once again, I was intrigued but not altogether shocked — this was, after all, a buyer’s economy for technology solutions, and shrinking license margins were no surprise. Fast-forward once again.

EMC recently announced that they were giving away developer’s editions of Documentum. Although it will likely improve their overall revenue ‘ecosystem,’ it’s certainly a new move for a platform that otherwise costs developers plenty to work with in the past. Just another drop in the bucket, though.

Enter FatWire and their PR a few week ago– Read more »

No more MOSS – Microsoft SharePoint 2010!

Chris Capossela, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Information Worker Product Management Group, answered a Q/A today about Microsoft’s next generation of Office products. You can find the official release here and the corresponding explanation on the SharePoint team blog here.

Product Roadmap:

Exchange 2010 – entering beta today; available in 2H 2009
Office 2010 —”tech preview” in Q309; release to manufacturing in 1H 2010
SharePoint 2010 – no more “Office” branding

Other product hints from the interview: Read more »