Cloud Poll

Evernote has a pitiful share of mind of business professionals, no pro IT manager is likely to advise transition of share of mind to this "upstart" provider.

Microsoft and Google are forever the "big dog" players, so concentrate on them and their associate players like UDOCx.

The big players are,however, weak in the mobile space, so place attention to Cortado and its partners.

There is going to be a lot of demand for iPad, Android and Blackberry wireless printing capabilities in 2011, right now!

I think Apple sold like 23M units of iPad in 2010. You can't ignore it.

Apple is the "king of tablet" computing with a commanding marketshare in 2010.

Do not leave your MFP out in the cold, because likely some competitor will have a solution that will attract the DM's attention.

2011 is a transition year. It is no longer about Microsoft vs the World. It is about iPad and Android OS vs Microsoft.

Remenber it was only two years ago that Laptops outsold desktops.

It was only this year that Smartphones outsold laptops.

The MFP Manufacturers have not quite yet identified who the Business Consumer will put their money down on yet for Cloud Services.

New Cloud providers are offering free 2GB-5GB Storage space for consumers, in the hopes that they will learn and like their OS and ultimately will pay for their services. AKA the "Free-mium" business model.

Box.net appears to me as a successul transition player with Fortune 500 names signed on.

Evernote is another example of an appealing consumer presence but will DM's ever buy their service in the developing Corporate business space regardless of price structure.


Not that EverNote/ Box.net/ Udocx prvides great levels of service, they are just not familiar and how long will they be in business before someone else bigger buys them?

The above players, based in the internet do not have the street boots on the ground to make the original B2B (Belly Button 2 Belly Button) sales solution work. That is why we as MFP professionals will, who call on actual end users and build relationship, will craft the solution.


As long as Corporate business data is 100% owned and transferrable from one Cloud Provider to another in a non proprietary format, I think we will enter an new era in Cloud Storage providers.

We, as MFP sales people, only have the industry knowledge to predict what might happen in the cloud in the next 24 monhts.

Microsoft's "Sky Drive", a free cloud based storage solution is now a player in the "freemium" space?

nice, and makes you think about the players.

Mircosoft Office 365 goes live today.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/43557789

It does have the superior appealing feature over GoogleDocs of allowing business to store their data on local servers. With Google, it appears your data must be 100% in the cloud.

BTW numbers 4 & 5 of the poll are for the soon to be released scan2cloud solution from Ricoh. 1 & 2 are from UDOCX.

Art...do you know if the 4 & 5 you mentioned will be a paid option or will that be offered free out of the box? On the Ricoh what do you need to have in place to print from the cloud? Or are these options just for scan2cloud?

I believe it's an SAS model, but I could be wrong there may be something in place similar to PPDM. With the Ricoh's as long as you have the PSIII module you can forward email attachments to the device and the device will print the attachment, there are a few limitations with this.

Not sure about the other cloud print except for HOT SPOT

Sorry Art...can you please explain. What is SAS model or PPDM? Will this be a free option on the Ricohs?

Canon's Cloud Portal - MEAP App allows you to connect a Canon ImageRUNNER-Advance to either GoogleDocs or MS Sharepoint Online. The MEAP App is free from Canon, and GoogleDocs will give you a free 1Gig of storage when you open a gmail account. The last time I checked a Terabyte of storage was ~ $250/year, which is pretty darn cheap. This allows you to Scan directly to GoogleDocs and Print Directly from GoogleDocs. You can even print MS Word, Excel, & Powerpoint docs that are stored on your GoogleDocs Account because Google will translate them into a PDF on the fly. But it still leaves them stored in their original format. So from a practical point of view this allows The Canon IR-Adv to print Word, Excel, & Powerpoint right from GoogleDocs.

I haven't done as much with the MS Sharepoint Online because it requires a subscription. I don't believe that I can print anything other than PDF or Image Files from MS Sharepoint Online.

Vince thanks for the description. You are absolutely correct. This is a very hot topic out there right now. I have used this several times and it works like a charm. Customers love it and it's FREE. Here is an interesting point to keep in mind as you know Google Docs is FREE however have you ever read the EULA? Did you know whatever you send to the cloud when using the free google docs that google owns the rights to your documents? They can do whatever they wish with your information. That is a scary food for thought. With Sharepoint however you subscribe to the cloud and your own that part of the cloud.

PPDM is a free software package from Nuance that is bundled with most Ricoh MFP's. One license only, allows the user to connect via server to set customer scan applications at the PC. Like scan2excel, scan2word, scan2sharepoint (i believe), plus searchable .pdfs, pdf fillable forms, data extraction (have not used this yet).

SAS, software as a service. Most companies are moving to this model such as Print Audit has now done with Print Audit Secure. Other SAS models would be Document Mall from Ricoh. Hope this helps!

Thanks Art. Is PPDM specific to Ricoh only? Or is it a general free software package as yo described that can be used with any MFP?

Still not to clear on the SAS model? Do they subscribe to a yearly software package?