Congratulations to Frank Cannata for another successful fundraising dinner. I understand he raised $80,000 for the Valvano Foundation to fight cancer at his annual awards dinner last week. I would have loved to have been there but had to miss it because I was spending that evening packing for my big move into a new house and a new office. Next year I’ll be there.
I’m still going over my notes from the Muratec dealer meeting. What I can report right now is that they are making a strong effort to be a complete secondary line option as they look to take on the competition from the likes of Lexmark, Oki Data, and Samsung head on. Expect to see at least 19 new products by the end of next year with four on the way between now and early December.
Sources also tell me that we may be seeing some big consolidations over at Ricoh Business Solutions in the near future. Why is this not a surprise?
Did you see Tom Callinan’s blog on the ECI acquisition of Digital Gateway on the Strategy Development site last week? What I found most interesting in the blog were the following comments regarding the ECI product mix:
It is illogical for ECi to develop and support over the long-term three different products for the exact same industry? You can bet that at some point in the future you will not have OMD, LaCrosse, and e-automate. The question becomes how does the transition to a single platform occur? Do you simply reduce development of OMD and LaCrosse and allow DGI to sell e-automate to current users of ECi’s other products? I cannot imagine that anybody would pay a new license fee to switch from one ECi product to another—would you? But if you don’t have a choice—if it is either buy a complete set of new licenses for “product C” instead of “product A” from the same company—or suffer through with a vastly inferior product, even after you paid years of maintenance fees, I guess you would have to swallow your common sense and pay-up. Maybe you will get a special price! Keep in mind this scenario is simply a possibility at this point and it is possible that ECi will simply move everybody onto one platform as part of the licensing fee their customers have paid for years while waiting for an upgrade.
Click here to read the entire blog post.
Next week we present our first round of Elite Dealer winners. Be here or be square. (I can’t believe I just wrote that because I’d never speak those words in conversation.)
New content this week includes:
- Print Audit Builds a Better Mouse Trap with the Introduction of Print Audit Secure
- A new Sales Pitch
- How to Get the Best Performance from the Service Side of Your Business
Thanks for reading!
