Technology demonstrations were held during KYOCERA Document Solutions’ Fiscal Year 2018 Business and Technology Conference.
Earlier this year, KYOCERA Document Solutions (KDA) held its Fiscal Year 2018 Business and Technology Conference in Las Vegas. Much of KDA’s 2018 focus is on software, so ENX Magazine took an opportunity to interview William Cassidy, director of Software Solutions for KDA, to garner insight into the company’s software strategy.
Tell us about KYOCERA’s software strategy.
Cassidy: KDA’s software strategy is pretty organic. I took it over about six years ago and back then we did not charge for any software solutions. We’ve pretty much upended the traditional model of a $10,000 copier sale and a $20,000 solution sale by basing our software strategy upon the $0.99 app model. We focused on making affordable, useful and focused apps, and generally staying away from the word “solutions.”
Senior management bought into the concept, but it took some time to build the team. Now, six years later, we have a development and support team. We’re always thinking about all the possibilities of what we can do and we pay attention to what the competition is doing, but our strategic direction comes from two areas: our dealers and our MFPs.
Most of our direction comes from looking at what our customers and dealers want. We maintain a database of all our dealer and customer requests, and our decisions are based upon what’s in there. We get a tremendous amount of insight from our dealers and especially our dealer council about what works, what doesn’t, and how it could be improved. Also, we always have a focus on “can we sell this now?” We don’t want to be too far ahead of the curve and have apps languishing that our dealers and customers aren’t ready for.
We also make sure that we keep our eye on the objective of selling MFPs. Our apps differentiate our hardware products and make MFP sales sticky by solving real customer problems. We aren’t looking at designing and selling stand-alone software solutions. We’re focused on helping KYOCERA customers efficiently use KYOCERA MFPs to solve their business problems.
Are your apps available globally or only in the United States?
Cassidy: About three years ago, we began to focus on the user interface and the user experience and our collection of apps really began to grow along with interest from around the world. We now have about 50 apps. These are built for North, South and Central America but they are available for all regions upon request. All our apps can be localized to any requesting region. The way it works is that a region requests localization, we send them all the strings, they translate them, and then we drop the translated strings in and send the app back for testing. It’s a simple model that works great with the kinds of apps we build.
You’ve mentioned how your apps are simple and straightforward. Do you ever go after more complex solutions?
Cassidy: Absolutely. Our standard apps are geared towards a majority of our customers, but we also proactively go after customization for large customers. We are also partnering with third parties for larger content management and productivity workflow solutions.
And how is business?
Cassidy: It has really been fun to watch it grow. Five years ago we were thrilled to sell 20 teaching assistant apps in our first month. Now we sell thousands of teaching assistant apps every month and we’re ready to move it up to the next level.
Do you have any concluding remarks or thoughts about this event?
Cassidy: I’d just like to say that I feel we have a good handle on our business model and are going to continue it going forward. We always try to be a little unique, but we are absolutely loyal to the brand. This event is great in that it gives us a chance to show off our new apps to leading dealers and to get their feedback face-to-face. As much as the dealers like it, I find that it really invigorates my team with new ideas from the dealers they meet and builds our excitement of how we can take it to the next level.
