Can Ricoh be Everything to Everyone?

Art Post (Guest)

Most of what I'm hearing from Convergence 2012 is Managed Services. Solve a customer business problems, dig deep into WHY they do this, and HOW they do that. Basically become more of a consultant than a box mover. Turn to Ricoh to partner with them for services

Print4Pay Hotel members have been selling solutions and always have been asking WHY you do what you do and HOW do you do that.

While Ricoh is still trying to figure this whole cloud thing out with solutions, keep in mind it's been 13 months since they spoke about ICE and it's still not launched and from what I hear it's slated for the last quarter of this year. The problem here is that Ricoh is connecting with other platforms and not developing their own Cloud platform to capture ongoing revenue streams with Saas & Cloud Services. By the time ICE is delivered companies like UDOCX, Intellenetics, and Fabasoft will be crushing it with their Cloud Services!

We've all heard the old saying you CAN'T be everything to everyone, but when you look at these Ricoh youtube videos,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p05mW1icU84, & http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...zrI&feature=related, you kinda of get the feeling that Ricoh wants to be a solutions provider for every process in the office. With the second video there is no clear, consise message, it's more of "You tell us your problems and we'll fix it".

Someone at Convergence 2012 told me today that with MDS you're still looking for ways to drive prints to hardware with software solutions. I get it, really, dig deep, probe, find the problems and see if we can fix it.

Can Ricoh dealers offer these types of solutions for business process solutions. Do dealers have the resources to try and solve every business process where there is a problem? If the answer is no, then how do we compete? Do you get the feeling that Ricoh is moving high up on the food chain for solutions? There's so many questions to ask and probably not a lot of answers.

Would like to hear from others, especially those that attended Covergence 2012.

Art

6/12/128:24 PM

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Original Post

Art Post (Guest)

I was talking to someone in the indsutry today and was told that Ricoh Direct is just offering Westbrook Technologies which offers Fortis. Here's the link http://www.westbrooktech.com/company/press_room.html for Document Management. While Ricoh Americas had other Document Management Offerings from other companies they elected to just use Westbrook Technologies. Now, this is just food for thought, that VP came from Ikon in the same position. They stuck with the IKON solution, keep in mind that Vince McHugh (P4P'er) stated here on the P4P forums that Ricoh Direct had changed over to the Ikon commission plan and eliminated the Ricoh plan.

For years IKON Management couldn't turn a profit, and most of the current management team is from IKON. Go ahead check em out on linkedin. What makes us think they can turn the Ricoh Americas ship around? I've said it before, I wonder if there was a back office deal cut that in order for Ricoh to make the purchase that there was an agreement that most IKON management would make the transistion.

Anyway back to the document management thingy, this leaves a tremdendous vacancy in the SMB marketplace for Document Management. Dealers can take advantage of this with document management solutions from Doculex, Intellinetics or Docuware (I'm sure there are many others)when there is a need with an SMB account.

Which brings me to another thought, does Ricoh Direct just concentrate on high end accounts and leave SMB's to dealers?

Comments?

6/20/129:19 PM