KDA Conference
At the KDA FY17 Business and Technology Conference at the Omni hotel and resort in Orlando, Florida, the theme was “Accelerate.”
During the welcome reception on Monday evening, Ed Bialecki, Senior Vice President of Sales announced the company’s goals for 2016. “Our strategy at KDA is clear and consistent,” stated Bialecki, addressing the audience from the stage. “It can be summarized in three words: Total document solutions.”
TDS has been Kyocera’s focus for several years. As the industry evolves into a consultative solutions-based model, Kyocera, like most OEMs, has sought to provide a combination of hardware, software and services to its customers.
“This helps customers improve their workflows, cut costs, and improve productivity,” explained Bialecki. “It’s a holistic strategy. It solves real customer problems and it delivers results.”
All of this was on display at The Technology Fair. Kyocera introduced 15 new A3 MFPs and 16 new desktop A4 MFPs (and printers) to be released across the Americas along with complementary business apps and document management solutions.
The new A3 MFPs range in speed from 25ppm to 80ppm in both color and monochrome. The feature set includes true 1200 dpi at full engine speed, standard Wi-Fi, and NFC as well as Wi-Fi-direct. At the education track “Color Me Kyocera,” Doug Cole from product marketing and Keith McManus the training team explained in greater detail some of the attributes, such new fuser designs, enhanced print functionality and the chemical color toner, whose smaller and more uniform particles provide greater consistency and color quality.
Featured business apps included DM Connect pro with the added Zone OCR and advanced barcode imaging; Google Connector which Kyocera says now allows bi-directional access to Google Drive cloud accounts and the related Google communication platforms; and Dropbox Connector, which allows direct and secure scanning to the popular cloud-based file sharing app.
More powerful solutions on display included the Square 9 Connector for document management solution, and Kyocera’s enhanced OnBase Connector for large companies. According to Kyocera, its PrivateScan “provides a simple and effective application for the secure transmission of documents from Kyocera MFPs.”
Peter Hendrick, Vice President of Corporate marketing and Business Services Division, noted that they planned on adding more solutions later in the year.
“Across all of our software development, technology trends in security, compliance and mobile will always be at the forefront of our efforts,” he said. “In particular, we keenly watch government sector compliance requirements, as many of them quickly trickle down to private companies.”
Kyocera Fleet Services was also showcased at the Technology Fair. It was previewed at last year’s conference, and Kyocera announced that it would go live on June 1, 2016.
Kyocera says that KFS enables dealers to remotely monitor all Kyocera products on a customers’ network. Features of KFS include providing dealers the ability to conduct remote analysis of customers’ equipment and even performing remote maintenance on Kyocera MFPs and printers. It also allows dealers to remotely configure customers’ devices and perform remote firmware upgrades, either on-demand or on a scheduled basis.
At the welcome reception, Takashi Kuki, President of Kyocera Document Solutions, addressed the audience via a recorded message. He spoke of the reshuffling of positions as Mr. Norihiko Ina was named the new KDC Senior General Manager of Corporate Sales Division and Mr. Yukio Ikeda was returning to his position as President of KDA after a successful stay in Italy. He also touched on the acquisition of Germany’s ECM Solution Vendor, Ceyoniq in November. He said they are preparing the solution package to sell as early as possible in the US market.
Mr. Ikeda, for his part, announced that effective May 16th, KDA had created a position within the Latin American Division called the Senior Vice President LAD Division and he named Mr. Sho Taniguchi as the one who would be to taking over this role. Mr. Taniguchi now has direct responsibility for all business in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, the Caribbean and all Latin American countries. Mr. Ikeda said that the role has been created to support KDA’s further growth and business expansion in LAD markets, which he called essential and where they still have big potential to grow.
FY16 marked the seventh consecutive year of growth in the Americas for KDA. It also marked the 5th consecutive year of record-breaking results for the KDA group. Kyocera grew its revenue in the U.S. by 9.6 percent over FY15 and, in the Americas as a whole, by 3.4 percent. The discrepancy between growth in the U.S. and overall growth in the Americas was due to the high value of the Yen compared to South American currencies over that time period.
