As I continue this ongoing series on the trends that will affect the various players in the office imaging space in 2014 I had the good fortune to speak with Dennis Amorosano, director and general manager, Software Product Marketing & Solutions Business Development Division, Canon U.S.A. He honed in on trends impacting the enterprise and production markets—two business segments that are near and dear to Canon.
He sees a continuation of trends that have been impacting these market segments during the last few years—cloud, mobility, solutions, and workflow.
“Starting with cloud and mobility it’s clear that with the vast majority of acquisitions of traditional device technology more customers are looking at ways they can take advantage of those technologies for tethered employees in the organization as well as employees who may be mobile,” notes Amorosano. “This may not just be folks in sales roles or outside of an office setting, but personnel inside a general office who are moving from one physical location in an office to another.”
The tie in with Canon is that mobility is creating additional requirements for them as a manufacturer in terms of ensuring that technologies are easy to integrate into various mobile platforms.
“This is opening up net new opportunities for our channel partners for not only selling these capabilities that are available today, but also providing appropriate consulting type services to help clients understand which of these mobile technologies are the most appropriate for their requirements,” states Amorosano. “That’s a major trend and one we expect to continue in 2014 as well.”
Focusing on the cloud, he adds that when people think of the cloud, their initial thought process goes to the fact that many more traditional package software applications are making their way into the cloud and offered on a service type basis to clients.
“Without question that’s going to continue and we’re going to find that the amount of packaged applications that end up in the cloud will be higher in 2014 than what we see today,” predicts Amorosano, “which in some ways is making the business model for customers and channel partners a simpler model because there’s less requirements for physical implementation at a customer site and there’s less expense for customers in terms of ongoing management of systems.”
He adds that in many cases cloud applications are being provided and offered under subscription-type business models, which gives customers flexibility in terms of the outlay of capital required to get these systems up and running. “It’s already having an impact in the marketplace and will have a bigger impact this year,” says Amorosano.
Plus many of the tools that Canon’s channel partners are using to remotely manage the implementation of technology within customer environments are also moving to the cloud. “By migrating these tools into a cloud-based infrastructure we’re able to lessen the dealer’s initial investment in technology beyond managing that technology in the dealership while helping our channel partners lessen their overall cost of service delivery and improve the level of service delivery,” adds Amorosano. “Migrating these tools into a cloud-based infrastructure will have a dramatic impact in helping channel partners get back to a level of service profitability that’s more in line with what they’ve seen historically and mitigate some of the margin pressures they’ve seen in the recent past.”
On the workflow front, where customers were once using their MFPs for copy and print services Canon is now seeing customers use the technology for document capture and distribution. The next leap forward in MFP utilization, according to Amorosano, will be business workflow.
“We’re seeing signs of this already,” he notes. “Customers are beginning to understand they’ve got this device, the MFP, which in of itself is a smart device that’s playing a critical role in their organizations; now to figure out how to further integrate that into their systems and streamline the work process. That train is starting to emerge and when we look at 2014, I don’t expect to see an explosion in terms of customers fully integrating these technologies for workflow, but I think we’ll see an even greater propensity for customers to do that.
“For Canon that’s music to our ears because we have this vision of where the marketplace is going and we’ve been gearing up to supply the technology as well as the services to help customers take advantage of these implementation scenarios. For Canon dealers it’s a great opportunity because it is an opportunity to break beyond the bounds of just providing customers with hardware and traditional break-fix services and get into things such as software provisioning, workflow consultation and the like, all of which are net new sources of revenue and profit to help those dealers become more intrinsically linked to the fabric of the way customers are conducting their business, which makes them very ‘sticky’ and difficult to unseat.”
The trends aren’t all that different on the production side although the nature of the way customers operate is clearly different versus commercial printers using Canon technology to generate revenue.
“Underlying these trends is the fact that more page volume in the commercial print space is digital as opposed to traditional analog page volume that’s been historically produced on offset technology,” says Amorosano. “As we look at the shift to digital what we’re finding is the commercial print operations are investing in technologies like the technologies that Canon provides whether they happen to be cut sheet or continuous feed. In doing so as a way of making sure they can handle that traditional page volume as it occurs.”
Around that is this need for production printers to also think about workflow. As a result the most successful commercial printers are looking to not only invest in technology to handle the digital page volume, but also are looking at workflow and trying to figure out how Canon can drive investment in workflow technologies as a way of pulling costs out of their output manufacturing process in much the same way as Canon is seeing this happen in the general office.
“That was a major trend in 2013 and will likely accelerate in 2014,” states Amorosano.
Another key trend is commercial printers becoming more than just output providers. “They’re now delivering more value-added services,” says Amorsano. “As the commercial printer market consolidated over the past five years, the folks that are left recognize who want to be in it for the long term need to build new delivery capabilities and provide additional value-added services to their customers. That represents a great opportunity for Canon and our channel partners who can provide the underlying technologies and services to help those commercial printers make that transition to delivering value added services.”
