For the past 29 years, Frank Cannata has been hosting his annual charity dinner and awards extravaganza. What started back in the old NOMDA days has evolved into a must-attend, entertaining industry event that brings together most of the movers and shakers from the office imaging industry, from the hardware OEMs, to the leasing companies, to the solutions and services providers, to BTA, and other folks related to the office imaging industry.
Without a doubt, the dinner is the industry’s ultimate networking event. Every other industry event, in my opinion, is a distant second. The awards presentations, based on the results of The Cannata Report annual survey, have almost become secondary to the networking and the charitable causes that this event supports. This year the dinner raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $75,000 for St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago.
The awards are still notable because they reflect the preferences of the dealers who subscribe to The Cannata Report. This year’s winners included:
Printer Manufacturer of the Year – Lexmark International, Inc.
MFP Manufacturer of the Year – Ricoh Company Ltd.
Best-in-Class Manufacturer of the Year – Toshiba America Business Solutions, Inc.
Manufacturing Executive of the Year – Rick Taylor, Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A., Inc.
If you haven’t been to this dinner before, put it on your calendar for next year. It’s a quality evening attended by quality people even if the jokes during the awards presentations don’t always hit the mark. Plus it’s hosted by quality people. Frank, his wife Carol, and son CJ have done a terrific job as usual putting together an event that brings together so many people who represent the heart and soul of the office imaging industry. And the industry is all the richer for it.
I’ll see you at next year’s dinner.
Thanks for reading.
