The Key Point Blog
For the past four years, Senior Vice President of Business Intelligence Services for Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. (KMBS) Sam Errigo has spearheaded the company’s vertical market-based solutions initiative. At “Shape the Future,” he noted that the strategy has differentiated Konica Minolta from the competition: “The days of simply selling hardware are diminishing at a rapid pace, and customers’ expectations will continue to challenge the industry. We need to think differently about how we service our customers and the services they value most. This requires a new business perspective in order to shape the future of your organization.”
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While Konica Minolta continues to call hardware its “core business,” devices clearly took a backseat to software at “Shape the Future”—and have for the past few shows. Regardless, as Senior Vice President of Marketing for Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. (KMBS) Kevin Kern said, “We still need to sell hardware, otherwise there won’t be any software.”
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Optical Character Recognition is not a new technology, but it has changed the course of document capture, and helped expedite the digital age by becoming more accurate and more affordable as time progresses. In BLI’s October 1989 issue of Update, we covered OCR and noted its lack of style, diversity and automation as a drawback. Current OCR programs can recognize a variety of font styles and sizes for a significantly lower price. In the 1989 article, the price of “Caere” OmniPage (now owned by Nuance Communications, Inc.) was $2,495 for an MS-DOS-compatible version. And that was considered an affordable price. Today, PC-based dedicated OCR software ranges in price from $100 to about $600 for a single user license. And some desktop scanners now offer basic embedded searchable PDF functionality as a standard feature in bundled scan utilities.
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Nearly 1,000 professionals convened in Orlando November 13-14 to participate in LEAD 2013, Toshiba America Business Solutions, Inc.’s (TABS) annual technology showcase. Unlike with most vendors, who have similar meetings every year attended by dealers and industry media, Toshiba’s approach is unique in that select end-users are also invited. The approach has paid dividends for Toshiba, as last year’s conference accounted for more than $7.2 million in new U.S. business for Toshiba from end-users.
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A crowd of over 900 attendees joined Sharp Imaging and Information Company of America (SIICA) in Orlando, Florida, for the Tour de Force 2013—the company’s national dealer meeting.
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Throughout his opening remarks at “Shape the Future,” President and COO of Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. (KMBS) Rick Taylor peppered in a few jokes, along with some self-deprecating humor. The news he and other executives shared over the next several hours in the Venetian Theater, though, was no joke.
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Hewlett-Packard (HP) hosted a small group of press and analysts at its campus in Boise, Idaho in mid-November to provide a closer look at the fall product introductions, gain further insight on software solutions and participate in a behind-the-scenes look at some of HP’s LaserJet test labs.
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In the age of BYOD (bring your own device), workers and IT directors need to find a way to increase mobility and compliance in office environments. Workers want to be able to print easily from their mobile devices; IT directors don’t want to compromise security. At a recent analyst event in Boise, HP offered insight on its current offerings for mobile printing in enterprise environments.
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