Sharp, Xerox And Canon
Spotlight Partnerships At AIIM/On Demand
May., 2005
At the
AIIM/On Demand conference, Sharp, Xerox and Canon touted new partnerships with
third-party solution providers as the three vendors drill down deeper into a
converging office products-IT market hungry for new workflow technology.
Sharp Document Solutions Company of America, Mahwah, N.J., said it has teamed
with eCopy, a Nashua, N.H., ISV and solution provider; Notable Solutions, a
Rockville, Md., content-capture workflow solution provider; and Captaris, a
Bellevue, Wash., provider of business document routing and management solutions.
Plans call for Notable’s customer workflow software to be integrated into
Sharp’s Imager multifunction printers and for Captaris to tailor its RightFax
MFP Module for Sharp’s Imager products. eCopy plans to port some of its document
management software to the Sharp lineup as well.
“There are people who still think of [office technology] as just another
copier or device,” said Bill Taylor, product manager at eCopy, which added Sharp
and Xerox to its lineup of hardware partners, which already included Canon. “We
have to show them that there is so much more they can do than just copy.”
Xerox introduced a new Partner Solutions Catalog, a listing of 14 technology
partners with 28 solutions developed for the Xerox DocuShare platform. Under the
arrangement, the Stamford, Conn.-based document technology giant and the
partners formed reseller relationships, in which the VARs can blend their
applications, DocuShare and Xerox printers, copiers or multifunction devices
into end-to-end document and workflow solutions, said David Ferretti, director
of worldwide sales for Xerox’s DocuShare Business Unit. “It’s a Xerox family,”
Ferretti said.
Canon U.S.A. said it has partnered with Ribstone Systems, Chicago, which
makes software that captures and helps process documents for the legal market.
Canon said the partnership brings to market the first vertical solution based on
its Multifunctional Embedded Application Platform (MEAP) for its imageRUNNER
multifunction devices.
The MEAP platform was created to enable the integration of third-party
document management technology into Canon hardware, the Lake Success, N.Y.-based
company said.
The AIIM/On Demand Conference and Expo, held this week in Philadelphia, is
expected to draw about 20.000 attendees from the document technology, digital
content management and IT arenas