KYOCERA ANNOUNCES NEW SOLUTIONS, HARDWARE AND BRANDING
AT 2012 DEALER SHOW
By Dan DiGiacomo, Associate Editor, May 16, 2012
While the theme of Kyocera’s 2012 Pan-American Dealer
Meeting urged attendees to “Focus on Success,” the company also had several
changes to announce, including new global branding and new U.S. leadership. Ed
Bialecki, senior vice president of sales for Kyocera Document Solutions
America, Inc., led the meeting’s general session at The Venetian in Las Vegas
with the announcement that, as of April 1, the organization had officially
changed its name globally to KYOCERA Document Solutions and appointed Nori Ina
as president and CEO, KYOCERA Document Solutions America, replacing Michael Pietrunti. The name change is accompanied by
a new logo and underscores Kyocera’s commitment to providing customers with
complete solutions rather than just hardware. “We see the change as a
tremendous opportunity, a new beginning if you will,” Bialecki said.
According to Katsumi Komaguchi, president of KYOCERA
Document Solutions Inc., Kyocera achieved record sales of 242.3 billion yen
(approximately $3 billion) for the fiscal year ending March 31, making 2011 the
fourth consecutive year of sales growth for Kyocera and the best single year in
company history, an impressive feat considering the poor economy and disasters
in Japan. Komaguchi also set an ambitious sales goal of 700 billion yen
(approximately $8.7 billion) for the coming year, with a solutions-centered plan
for the future. Komaguchi stressed a global standardization of solution sales
processes, an increase in HyPAS solution releases functionality and increased
R&D engineering staff to strengthen its customized software capabilities.
Focusing on Success
In the general session, attended by more than 1,200 dealers
and analysts, new Kyocera Document Solutions America chief Nori Ina touched on
the meeting’s theme of “Focus on Success,” explaining that it had a dual
meaning: First, as a symbol of the company’s change in focus, with a new
corporate name and evolving brand, and second, in its focus on supporting the sales
efforts of the dealer channel, helping them to provide customers with a
complete solution for their document management needs. Ina mentioned the two
biggest indicators of growth were the successful launch of TASKAlfa and
Copystar A3 MFPs in the US and the Americas and the dramatic increase in sales
of A4 MFPs and printers by the dealer channel, a signal of a more balanced
deployment of devices within dealer customer bases.
In terms of customer support, Ina also discussed a
commitment to improved product reliability, with enhanced service and hotline
support and an improved warranty program. Kyocera will also roll out a new
growth-oriented sales approach with the Sales Excellence program, available to
the dealer channel later this year, which will specifically target
enterprise-level customers. Additionally, Kyocera is launching a new learning
management system for training sales representatives that includes webinars,
FAQs, and courses as well as a website to track employee progress and
transcripts.
Ina pointed to the strength of Kyocera’s core business—MFPs
and printers with low TCO (total cost of ownership), and outlined a plan for 16
new devices for the coming year. Stressing the importance of offering customers
complete document solutions, Ina announced that Kyocera would launch 10 new software
solutions between now and June. The Tech Fair floor, separated into areas
identifying vertical markets such as government, education, legal, and healthcare,
demonstrated the integration between Kyocera’s HyPAS-enabled devices and
solutions designed to address workflow issues in those markets. While some
solutions, such as Legal Sender, are designed for a particular vertical market,
other solutions, like DMS Link 4.0, have been specifically tailored for various
vertical markets.
Hardware as a Core Business
Throughout the general session, Kyocera emphasized its
commitment to printer and MFP hardware as the core business and officially showcased
five new models at the dealer meeting—four Ecosys MFPs and an addition to the
TASKalfa line.
The TASKalfa 2550ci, announced to cheers from the
dealer audience, is a hybrid 25-ppm color MFP that utilizes the engine of the Ecosys
devices but the control panel of the other A3 TASKalfa models. It features the
same finisher as the Ecosys models and a built-in 160-GB hard drive. The Ecosys
FS-C8520 and FS-C8525 are 20- and 25-ppm color MFPs similar to the last-generation
models, but featuring HyPAS support and increased memory – standard 1.5 GB of
RAM upgradeable to 2 GB. Similarly, the Ecosys FS-6525 and FS-6530 are 25- and
30-ppm HyPAS enabled monochrome units with increased memory – standard 1GB of
RAM upgradeable to 2 GB.
Peter Hendrick, vice president of marketing for KYOCERA
Document Solutions America, also noted that the company would be releasing its
biomass toner in May. Announced last year, Biomass toner is 30 percent
plant-based and is in keeping with Kyocera’s environmentally conscious business
approach.
Targeting Vertical Markets
In his keynote, Ina pointed out as one of his visions
for success the expanded customization capability afforded by HyPAS-powered
machines, citing it as a factor in helping dealers penetrate vertical markets.
This is exemplified by DMS Link 4.0, which enables users to establish an
interface between a Kyocera MFP and an existing document management system.
Kyocera has tailored the latest version of DMS Link—which now offers Nuance OCR
as an optional upgrade – to each vertical market with pre-set workflows
optimized for each vertical market. For instance, DMS Link 4.0 for Healthcare
features pre-set workflows that handle medical forms processing with barcodes,
patient registration forms, medical wristband printing and insurance billing.
An education-targeted version of the software focuses instead on the challenges
faced in a school setting, such as indexing, archiving and printing activity; course
registration and enrollment forms; and records tracking to monitor student
progress. In addition, Kyocera demonstrated versions of the software for the legal
and finance sectors, and touted its willingness and ability to tailor the
software for a given enterprise’s particular needs or challenges.
Targeting the legal market directly is Legal Sender,
an embedded solution for A3 and A4 MFPS due in July that scans and sends legal
documents as email attachments. From a website, users can enter a court name
and email address to which a set of documents are to be routed, then choose the
maximum size of the documents, so that larger documents will automatically be
split into multiple emails if necessary. The user can verify or modify the
sending information at the MFP control panel before scanning and sending the
job. A QuickScan option allows users to print bar-coded cover pages for
multiple jobs to be sent at once. When a stack of documents is placed in the
MFP’s document feeder the barcode on the cover page directs the job to the
appropriate court and email address.
Another solution potentially useful in the legal and
medical fields is DL Verify, currently in testing with a June release depending
on dealer feedback. DL Verify, compatible at first with A4 MFPs, lets users
scan both sides of a driver’s license, then prints a verification page
confirming the license’s veracity. This is useful in confirming identities, and
also for sending a person’s ID information to autofill forms. It doesn’t
require access to outside identity databases, as the application confirms the
identity information on the front of the card by comparing the data encoded on
the back.
In the education market, Kyocera will release Teaching
Assistant 2.0, an embedded solution that allows educators to print customized
test and answer sheets, then scan and grade their students’ work. New features
in this iteration include the ability to save and email PDF and CSV files of test
results and summary sheets and increased grading options (including the ability
to add plus and minus grades).
Universal Solutions
Kyocera also spotlighted several solutions that are
intended for use across all markets – perhaps most significantly an updated KX print
driver that features an icon-based interface and simplified, customizable
workflow structure. For instance, in addition to allowing each user to
customize the interface to their liking, the driver now enables users to switch
between PCL and PostScript emulations from within the driver, versus having to
navigate through device “Properties” to make the switch. The KX driver will
also feature fully adjustable Ecoprint settings, administrator privileges that
allow some options (such as color printing) to be password-protected, and more.
The KX Driver will work in conjunction with KM Net Admin 3.0, available in May.
The biggest change for the latest version of Net Admin is the ability to clone a
device’s settings and replicate it for other devices, which will save
administrators time when rolling out HyPAS apps to entire fleets.
In terms of mobile workflows, Kyocera is launching the
Cloud Connect app, which enables users to print from and scan to Evernote
accounts using a Kyocera HyPAS-enabled MFP’s touch screen, eliminating the step
of scanning to a PC workstation, then sending files to Evernote. Cloud Connect
supports JPEG, PDF and TIFF files, and may expand to include other cloud
storage sites in the future.
Another useful mobile app is Kyocera Mobile Print,
which enables users of Apple iOS and Android-based mobile devices such as smart
phones and tablets to print documents and images to and scan from HyPAS-enabled
Kyocera printers and MFPs in their network. The app handles PDF, JPEG, PNG, TXT
and HTML documents, and enables print tracking by an administrator.
Kyocera also unveiled Sharepoint Connector 4.0, the
latest version of the software that enables users to scan from a Kyocera MFP
into an existing Sharepoint library. Like DMS Link, Sharepoint Connector offers
an optional Nuance OCR upgrade.
Finally, Kyocera has teamed with API Technologies on
the Cryptek Netgard MFD, a drop-in, in-line, multi-factor user authentication
solution that integrates with Kyocera HyPAS-enabled MFPs. Netgard MFD requires
users to authenticate with a certificate-based PKI smart ID card and personal
identification number (PIN), preventing unauthorized users from accessing
sensitive documents and also tracking device usage. The system, currently
employed by government agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Defense,
supports local user authentication as well as network authentication with LDAP
or Active Directory.
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