Weekend MFP Industry Notes Newsletter
1-23-2011
- In a press conference, Ricoh’s CEO, Shiro Kondo, announced it would invest $300 million to grow its global “Managed Document Services” infrastructure, designed to “aggressively accelerate its shift to a services business model”
- Just like in some other Ricoh color MFPs, the company announced that if you choose the 1200x1200dpi high quality print mode in the new Aficio MP C300 and MP C400 color laser A4 MFPs, the machines slow down half speed to only 15ppm, as the laser must draw the image twice on the drum in order to achieve this resolution. The engines also have a maximum of only 4 bits per pixel.
- Desktop laser MFP causes fire. San Diego fire department reports that a house in Rancho Bernado had $400,000 in structural damage and $200,000 worth of furniture damage due to an overheating desktop MFP. The make and model was not released.
- Toshiba announced it won contract to supply railcar parts for transit systems in Washington DC and Chicago.
- Toshiba announced it won contact to help build a $1.2 billion solar plant in Bulgaria.
- Toshiba announced it is partnering with Rolls-Royce Group to bid on nuclear power plant project in Wylfa, England.
- Toshiba announced it won contract to provide two hydroelectric generators for hydro power plant in Guanyinyang, China.
- Samsung of South Korea announced it purchased Liquavista Corp. of the Netherlands, and plans to use the company’s technology to make electronic LCD bookreaders. (to compete with Amazon Kindle, Apple iPad, etc.)
- Fraser Advanced Information Systems, a Sharp/Canon/HP/Muratec/KIP dealer with locations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, announced it has acquired PennLantic Corp, a managed IT services provider in Pennsylvania. Purchase price not revealed.
- Punch of Belgium announced it sold a Xeikon 8000 production color system to Bradford & Bigelow, a print shop in Massachusetts which will use the digital color press to produce school text books.
- Marvell, which makes print controllers, has been served with a patent infringement lawsuit from Advanced Processor Technologies of Frisco, Texas over a computer memory management patent.
- Conexant, maker of print controllers, has an investor that launched a putative class action lawsuit to block the company’s proposed $284 million purchase by Standard Microsystems Corp., claiming that the deal is grossly unfair to shareholders.
- Perceptive Software, a division of Lexmark, announced that its imageNOW document management software can now be integrated with Napersoft Customer Communications Management software, which automates the creation of distribution of all types of documents.
- Computhink of Lombard, IL, announced version 7.0 of its ViewWise document management software, add support for Microsoft Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008R2.
- Okidata announced that its plant in Thailand won a Energy Service Company (ESCO) Project Award for proactive efforts to promote resource conservation.
- Van Gansewinkel Company of Germany announced the first 100% recycled office paper, claiming that no trees have to be cut down for manufacturing. It claims that Van Gansewinkel Office Paper:
o uses 83% less water when made
o requires 72% less electricity when made
o 53% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions when made
- ABBYY of Russia announced a new cloud based document management product, called ABBYY Online, and offers OCR, online dictionary & translation features.
- Kyocera (aka Kyota Ceramic Company) launched two new A3 b/w laser MFPs, called the TASKalfa 255 and TASKalfa 305 featuring:
o Are part of “SMARTtech” series or “Simple Management and Replacement Technology”
Claims that a PM can be performed in under 10 minutes due to cartridge based, tool-free design
PM cycle is 300,000
o advertised as offering benefits of A3 paper size, at the price of competitive A4 units
o Base MSRPs of $4679 and $5879
o Top speeds of 25ppm and 30ppm respectively
o Max duty cycles of 40K/month and 50K/month
o Very small color LCD touchscreen
o Amorphous silicon (ASi ceramic) drum with expected life of 300,000 pages
o Toner yield of 15,000 pages based on 5% coverage per page
o Waste toner receptacle with yield of 7,500 pages (unit apparently does NOT recycle toner)
o 20 second warmup time, 7.8 second first copy out time
o 600x600dpi actual print resolution (advertised as offering 1800dpi with interpolation)
o Auto duplex standard
o Maximum paper supply of 1,600 sheets
Comes standard with 550 sheet drawer and 100 sheet bypass
Drawers hold up to 64gsm
Bypass can hold up to 140lb. index
o 50 sheet document feeder standard (top scan speed of 40opm)
o Shipped with no Styrofoam packing in the box
o Shipped on pallet entirely made of cardboard instead of wood
o Optional 400dpi fax board
o Built-in print controller
667MHz IBM PowerPC processor
USB port on control panel
10/100/1000BaseT ports
PCL, XPS and PostScript print drivers
512MB RAM standard (can upgrade to 1536MB)
No hard drive available
IPv6 support
Integration with MS Windows Active Directory standard
Optional HID card reader
Color scanning (output is only b/w)
Scan to email with LDAP/SMB/SMTP/FTP/TWAIN
- Hewlett Packard announces a shakeup of its board of directors:
o Departing are Robert Ryan, John Joyce, Joel Hyatt and Lucille Salhany.
o Joining are Shumeet Banerji (CEO of Booz & Co.), Patricia Russon (former CEO of Alcatel-Lucent), Dominique Senequier (CEO of AXA), Meg Whitman (former CEO of eBay and ran for governor of California) and Gary Reiner (former CIO of General Electric)
- Hewlett Packard dealer, Laser Resource of Grand Rapids, MI, announced it won managed print services contract from Metro Health. Details:
o 210 beds
o 14 regional medical centers
o Now 100% HP fleet of printers and MFPs
o Was originally spending $40,000 per month on printing, including printer cartridges, copier leases, and service/supply contracts.
o Reduced print volume from 1.7 million pages per month to 1.2 million per month
- Hewlett Packard announced it won a managed IT contract for $300 million from Fomento De Construcciones Y Contratas, a public services company in Spain.
- Notable Solutions Inc. (NSi) announced that version 6.0 of its popular AutoStore middleware solution is due by end of first half of 2011.
- Canon announced it won following awards from Buyers Labs Inc.:
o Pick of Year for IR-6075 b/w MFP
o Pick of Year for IR-6055 b/w MFP
o Outstanding Achievement For Energy Efficiency” for IR-C5051 color MFP
o Pick of Year for IC-MF5880dn desktop b/w MFP
o Pick of Year for imageRUNNER ADVANCE Essentials software
o Pick of Year for uniFLOW v5.0 software
o Pick of Year for iPF6350 color inkjet wide format printer
o Pick of Year for imageCLASS LBP6000 laser printer
o Pick of Year for MF9280Cdn desktop color MFP
- Canon announced it will shift production of low-end video cameras from Japan to China to reduce manufacturing costs.
- Has the consolidation begun? Canon announced that it will take over Oce’ operations in India. Employees from former Oce’ branches will now report to Kensaku Konishi, President and CEO of Canon India.
- Former Xerox employee, inventor of Ethernet, and founder of 3Com Corp., Bob Metcalfe, announced he is now Professor of Innovation at University of Texas in Austin.
- A maker of generic toner cartridges may be headed for bankruptcy. American TonerServ (ATS) of Rohnert Park, CA was on an acquisition spree back in late 2007 & 2008, scooping up iPrint Technologies, Image Technology Products, Mid-America Environmental, Pendl Companies, and Tonertype.
o In the first nine months of 2010, ATS had reported record revenue, and the firm announced in November that it was averaging 1,500 toner cartridge sales per day, a 50 percent increase compared to approximately one year ago..
o On December 30, ATS filed a form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in which the company said it has ceased normal business operations. The filing reads, “Management is now considering the future course of action, which may include requesting protection under the U.S. bankruptcy laws and/or a liquidation of the company’s remaining assets. In any event, the company does not expect to be able to resume any normal business operations. It is also unlikely that the company’s shareholders would receive anything for their shares in a bankruptcy proceeding or liquidation.”
-
- Mark Allen Dearborn of Gilbert, Iowa was arrested by local police after he was caught with fake $20 bills that he made on a color copier, trying to make a purchase at a local Walmart.
- Heidelberg announced it would resell VUTEk wide format inkjet printers made by EFI. The company also announced that it repaid a loan it received from the government.
- MWA Intelligence Inc. (MWAi), maker of remote service management software, announced it is participating in the 4th annual Intel Executive Networking Series Embedded Customer Event in Arizona.
- Kofax, maker of middleware document capture solutions (competes with Nuance eCopy and NSi AutoStore, etc.), announced it is selling off its hardware business for $23.2 million to a German investment group, and will be called Dicom. The company is considering making an acquisition to grow its software business.
- New company is formed to provide document capture middleware solutions, named DocSolid. Details:
o founded by Steve Irons, former founder of ImageTag KwikTag
o headquartered in Phoenix, AZ
o First product is AirMail2 featuring:
o Works with any scanner or MFP, because rather than an embedding an application in the device, end user just scans to a folder on the PC
o When user is ready to scan, they select command from the MailMan software loaded on to server
o Document to be scanned will be affixed with a barcode, which is printed on a label from a postage stamp printer
Stamps use two-dimensional DataMatrix bar codes
In contrast, KwikTag uses bar-coded Post-It Notes
o MailMan software reads bar-code, cleans up and formats images, and sends images to internal server location or to PostOffice, which is a cloud-based storage service
o $3995 for unlimited number of users
o $395 license for each scanning device
o Optional connectors to document management systems
- The U.S. Postal Service and Discover Card announced a deal giving Discover incentives to increase its usage of direct mail during next 3 years. To qualify for rebates, Discover must increase its mail volume by 10% in 2011, 15% in 2012 and 20% in 2013.
- Muratec announced that its MFX-2570 desktop fax was awarded a 5 Star Award from BLI for its performance in an Environmental Test.
- Lyra Research reported its view of worldwide sales of digital b/w MFPs in 2010:
o 78% of units placed were desktop units
o Shipments of Segment 3 (31-39ppm) A4 units up 90%, just under 80,000
o Segment 2 (21-29ppm) A4 units up 30% to 500,000
o Segment 1 (20ppm or slower) A4 units down 12%
o Segment 1 A3 units down 17% to 300,000
o Total A3 units down 150,000
o Total A4 units up 400,000
o Segment 4 (40-69ppm) A4 units up 10%
o Forecasts that total shipments will increase 4%, but total revenue will drop 10% to $16.3 billion
- Medsphere announced it won a contract for its OpenVista EHR system from Cooper Green Mercy Hospital of Alabama.
- Meditech announced it won contract from Charlotte Hungerford Hospital of Connecticutt.
- BMC Healthcare of Maryland announced it will use Meditech EHR in hospital and eClinicalWorks in its physician offices.
- HIPAA breach. The St. Vincent Indianapolis Hospital in Indiana had to notify 1,800 patients that their protected health information (PHI) may have been compromised when a hacker successfully persuaded some employees to reveal a login to the hospital’s email system.
- A survey of hospital by Accenture shows EHR installs:
o Epic = 30%
o Cerner = 30%
o Eclipsys (division of Allscripts) = 10%
o GE Centricity = 10%
o McKesson = 10%
o Meditech = 5%
o Siemens = 5%
o Quadramed = 5%
- Children’s Hospital of Boston, MA announced that it acquired:
o eClinicalWorks as its EHR
o Perceptive (Lexmark) imageNOW as its document management system
o Hewlett Packard for its MFPs and printers
o NSi AutoStore as middleware to connect HP MFPs to imageNOW
- Allscripts announced that its EHR connects to Cardiac Science Corp’s automated external defibrillators and diagnostic cardiac monitoring devices.
- In survey published by OpenText of internal medicine trainees, it was revealed that over two-thirds were spending more than 4 hours per day on documentation.
- Cerner announced an install of its Millennium EHR system at Memorial Hermann Healthcare System of Houston, Texas, as well as Lancaster General Health of Lancaster, PA.
- According to The New York Times newspaper, the United States government and Israel’s government worked together to develop the Stuxnet worm that’s blamed for crippling Iran’s program to develop a nuclear weapon. The worm reportedly knocked out one-fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges.
- HIPAA breach: A nurse fired for allegedly looking at the medical records of Tiger Woods is suing for defamation and says he never saw the golf star's files, the Orlando Sentinel reported Friday.
o David Rothenberg seeks 400,000 dollars in damages plus reinstatement and a letter of explanation from officials at Health Central, the hospital where Woods was taken after a November 2009 car crash.
o Hospital officials fired Rothenberg in December of 2009 for looking at the record of Woods three times within 10 minutes on his computer, according to the lawsuit filed Friday.
o Rothenberg, who faces the loss of his nursing license, accused the hospital of defamation and conspiracy to defame plus violating polygraph procedures and causing harm to his reputation.
o Rothenberg argues the evidence against him was circumstantial and that he left his computer terminal unattended and someone else logged in to peep at the golf star's medical records.
- According to a one industry author, in the year 2010, Epic secured EHR contracts from the following hospitals:
o Johns Hopkins
Catholic Health Services of Long Island
New Hanover Regional Medical Center
Ochsner
Moses Cone
Bronson
St. Joseph Michigan – Lakeland
Martin Memorial
Idaho – St. Luke’s
US Coast Guard
Provena
Aurora
University of Mississippi Medical Center
JPS Health Network
SUNY Upstate Medical University
LSU Health
Rochester General
ProHealth Care
Owensboro
Rockford
Sansum
Access Community Health Network
Bassett Healthcare
Stormont-Vail Health Care
Hurley Medical Center
Temple University Health System
Amphia Hospital (Netherlands)
Memorial Healthcare System
Orange Regional Medical Center
Tampa General Hospital
Wenatchee Valley Medical Center
Original Post