uniFLOW, Therefore and the Cloud Highlighted
In a conference call addressing industry analysts, Tom O’Neill, director of marketing for Canon U.S.A.’s Enterprise Solutions Division, said the company’s solutions service business grew by nearly 50 percent. “uniFLOW and Therefore experienced big growth,” added Hiro Imamura, vice president and general manager of Canon U.S.A.’s Business Imaging Solutions Group. That’s no surprise in a time when the document imaging industry continues to shift focus to software.
The topic of uniFLOW and Therefore—the former, Canon’s holistic approach to providing output management, secure printing, scanning, and job routing; and the latter, an information and business process management solutions—addressed dealer and customer concerns alike. “Dealers can use those tools as the platform for their consultative services,” explained O’Neill, pointing out that these solutions leave Canon’s dealers well equipped to provide Managed Document Solutions (MDS) and Managed Print Services (MPS).
“From a market standpoint, customers really like the technology, but technology that doesn’t help them accomplish something isn’t worth a penny,” said O’Neill. To that, Canon believes Therefore and uniFLOW will help customers accomplish what they need. “Between the business analytics and workflow analysis tools offered by Therefore, in addition to the ongoing reporting that uniFLOW can provide, we’re seeing our customers embrace the knowledge,” added Imamura. Ultimately, it’s this wealth of knowledge that will help customers make better decisions in changing or modifying processes and fleet-related investments, leading to reduced costs.
Canon has big plans for leveraging cloud technologies to bolster support for their dealers, ultimately improving the way both customers and dealers can manage their software and managed services. O’Neill made a point to mention that these technologies are particularly useful for dealers who want to get into managed services.
“Cloud Portal will be expanding to all areas, for both Canon-developed and third-party solutions,” said Imamura. “As we do more cloud services, we need to provide our customers with more flexibility in accessing these services.” O’Neill clarified that Cloud Portal is more than just an app store, emphasizing how the company wants “to provide an easier way for customers to get an application they want to utilize when working with their print systems.” But with the influx of cloud services, Canon’s dealer partners need a platform to help manage their customers' disparate cloud services. The company responded with Canon Business Solutions Platform (CBSP), an infrastructure platform providing dealers with “the ability to manage ongoing subscription based services, accounts, contracts, and other things people weren’t ready to manage.” Most simply stated, CBSP is a tool for dealers to bring order to managing a variety of different cloud services.
Canon’s plan to support dealers doesn’t end with better infrastructure tools. “We have a vertical market approach from a marketing and support standpoint,” said Imamura. “We look at our channel to deliver those (vertical) sales, but we need to be able to support them as they go to these vertical markets.” This comes in the form of vertical market specialists who put together the message of how the technology can be applied to those markets. Even more important, it allows Canon to have a good focus on what those verticals need, and how to support dealers when they get to those customers.
Essentially, Canon’s focus boils down to a desire of delivering applications and services through a single-facing portal supported by a holistic platform, employing intelligent, verticalized marketing of their otherwise horizontal solutions.
Looking ahead to 2016, Imamura predicted “good growth” in MDS and fleet-management. Further, he believes that uniFLOW will continue to evolve, offering additional growth. One aspiration Imamura and O’Neill were excited about was integrating technologies from different areas of Canon’s vast portfolio, which stretches well beyond the document imaging space to still and video camera equipment and more. Citing a demonstration from Canon EXPO 2015 where network cameras were used in conjunction with uniFLOW for user authentication at MFPs, O’Neill said we should expect more convergence in the future. “We want to leverage everything in our hands to bring more holistic, customer-centric solutions to the table.”
“EXPO showed that Canon is more than just a hardware provider. We are a solutions developer, too.” –Tom O’Neill
As for customers' expectations, Canon is always listening. “They are really looking to access the services they need to use where ever they are.” Another growing demand from the market was best described as “a ubiquitous personalization thing” which O’Neill described as “when users walk up to a device, they want their settings to follow them.” One answer to this demand was on display at Canon EXPO 2015 in the form of My ADVANCE, a feature available on future imageRUNNER ADVANCE devices that allows users to customize a device’s control panel that will follow them to subsequently visited devices.
Most importantly, customers are looking for something that, according to Imamura, “isn’t so much a technology thing as it is a desire for something that’ll work—something easy and transparent that will handle workflows automatically so the worker doesn’t have to worry about anything but doing their job.” Canon plans on executing that concept through their product’s evolving engines and solutions in order to help customer reach their goals.
Stay tuned in December for our Strategy Session articles on Canon U.S.A.’s office hardware, software solutions, production print and wide format devices!
