*NEWS*OFFICE SYST. UNDERGOING BIG CHANGES

[Anonymous]

Office systems undergoing big changes
BOSTON – You might think you’ve heard about every possible security vulnerability in your network, but what about your copiers?
“Network-connected
output devices are becoming an absolute primary target of people,
foreign and domestic, who are penetrating networks,” said Jim Joyce,
senior vice president for office services at Xerox Global Services.
“Many of them are large devices with large disk drives, with a fair
amount of memory and are network-connected and are not secure. This
laptop [I’m using for this presentation] is probably 10 times more
secure than any of the output devices we have in our environments
today.”
Joyce, sparking at the two-day Office Document Solutions
conference in Boston last week, was among a number of presenters who
implored makers of printers, copiers, scanners and other such devices
to start thinking about more than just selling boxes to customers.
Joyce
said during an interview after his speech that Xerox has poured about
$20 million in recent years into technologies to better manage office
and document systems and is putting a particular emphasis on security
these days. He noted that some machines, such as multifunction devices,
might have several operating systems in them that could provide
security holes if not protected.
Look for Xerox in the months ahead
to deliver more in the way of technologies that would enable document
systems to be able to identify content so that companies can better
prevent theft of intellectual property and other confidential data.
Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center has been working on such
technologies, Joyce said.
Meanwhile, other office document-product vendors said they seek to go beyond selling boxes.
While
“solutions” might qualify as the single-most overused word in the IT
industry over the years, presenters embraced it as a fresh concept
capable of bringing new life to their industry.
Charles Pesko, a
director at InfoTrends/CAP Ventures, greeted attendees at the
consulting and research firm’s event by stating that the U.S. copier
market is maturing and that solutions are the answer to revenue growth.
Not only do solutions – in the form of software, support and
maintenance – offer revenue opportunities, but vendors that succeed
here also will see a rise in hardware sales. For every dollar in
solutions sold, a company will sell $4 or $5 of hardware with it, he
said.
“A lot of people just don’t get that yet,” he said.
Among
the biggest opportunities are document capture and creation, document
management and document output management, said Joel Mazza, another
InfoTrends/CAP Ventures director.
A panel of vendor representatives
from Konica Minolta, Ricoh, Toshiba America Business Solutions and
Sharp Electronics agreed that solutions are the way to go. However,
they said it is difficult to change overnight given that the hardware
business is worth tens of billions of dollars a year, whereas the
solutions market is a sliver of that. Most of them said they are not
making money on solutions so far, but consider their efforts in
software, support and more as an investment that will pay off in the
long run.
Bill Brewster, vice president of marketing for Konica
Minolta Business Solutions, said every RFP his company gets includes a
demand for at least one of four solutions offerings, such as security,
device management, document management or workflow. The fact that
delivering solutions can help sell boxes isn’t a bad thing, he said,
but emphasized that vendors need to commit to developing strong
software and support offerings to make the solutions attractive.
The
vendors also acknowledged they need to address how to encourage
value-added resellers and other channel partners to sell the software
given that current compensations systems are largely hardware oriented.
Wayne
Lyle, IS director for law firm Preti Flaherty, shared with attendees
his organization’s experiences making strategic use of office document
systems. Over the past few years the firm, which has 80 attorneys in
five offices in New England, has rolled out software from eCopy and
Interwoven to streamline handling of documents, as well as voice mail,
e-mail and even dictation.
The system has enabled attorneys and
their assistants to scan documents into a network system that allows
for easy access and secure storage of documents that previously would
have been stuffed in filing cabinets or stored elsewhere. “We feared
electronic images were just going to explode and nothing would be there
to control what we were doing,” said Lyle, who works in Portland, Maine.
Having
a document-management system in place has been important given the
SarbanesOxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act. Even though those rules wouldn’t typically apply to
a law firm, Preti Flaherty is a full-service outfit that works with
healthcare and other businesses that do have to stick to those rules.
“We get hit with those regulations from all sides because our clients
do,” Lyle said.
Lyle said in an interview following his presentation
that the firm’s system handles roughly 1.5 million documents (largely
in Word) and requires a couple hundred gigabytes of storage. But he
foresees a time not far off when the law firm will need to split its
master database to handle burgeoning volume.
On the broader issue of
office document-system vendors needing to go beyond offering just
boxes, Lyle said he is all for it and noted that the integration among
his scanning, document management and office equipment played a key
role in his purchase decisions. Partnerships between vendors are
important given the variety of office equipment at most companies and
the specific needs of organizations in different vertical markets. “I
just hope it’s more than talk,” he said.

[Author]

December 1, 2005 at 10:23 AM