Architectural, engineering and construction companies, manufacturing firms and commercial print shops have an affordable new option for their black-and-white technical documents. Xerox Corporation’s (NYSE: XRX) Wide Format 6604 and 6605 Solutions mark the eighth and ninth wide format products the company has unveiled in the last two years.

The compact new systems integrate 600 x 600 dpi copying, scanning and printing with an easy-to-use interface to ensure crisp, accurate image quality on jobs such as emergency services maps, electrical wiring diagrams or construction plans. An on-board color scanner allows for hard copy documents to be scanned to electronic files or can copy existing prints of varying sizes, including the most common wide-format size drawings, E and A0 documents.

The 6604 and 6605 Solutions can produce up to four and five D or A1 size images per minute, respectively. Users can select a two-roll paper option for greater printing capacity. The 15-inch color touch screen and intuitive user interface make them easy to operate, even for users that don’t have familiarity with wide format printers.

"What sets these products apart are the simple graphical user interface, high-quality output and modular approach, which make it easy for customers to add features and capacity as needs change," said Tim Greene, director of wide-format and jetting technologies at InfoTrends, a leading market research and consulting firm in the digital imaging and document solutions industry.

The printers are equipped with the FreeFlow® Accxes® Print Server – allowing customers to preview scans and simultaneously print, copy and scan-to-file with select options. Other new features include:

Availability and Pricing
The Xerox 6604 and 6605 Solutions will be available worldwide for order and installation in November 2009. An upgrade to a color scanner for current Xerox 6204 Wide Format Solution customers will also be available. The base configuration starts at a U.S. list price of $19,300.

Customer Contact:
For more information, please contact your local Xerox sales representative.
For more information about Xerox production systems and services, visit http://www.xerox.com/tr/products or call 800-ASK-XEROX.

DISCLAIMER: The content of this press release is reproduced unedited and appears here as we originally received or sourced it. The opinions expressed in this press release are exclusively those of the company whose product(s) and or services this press release describes. Readers who purchase a product based solely on the claims of this press release do so entirely at their own discretion. We do not guarantee the objectivity or accuracy of this press release.

Getting a handle on print costs

Less than 10 percent of South African companies are aware of their actual print costs, an area that if properly controlled can help save up to 30 percent on total office printing costs. So says Kevin Johnstone, Business Unit Manager: Managed Print Services at IT systems, software, hardware and consulting services provider, Datacentrix.

“Printing costs generally represent between one and three percent of gross revenue for an organisation,” explains Johnstone. “These figures are brought sharply into perspective when you consider that 22 percent of documents are never used and 34 percent are used for less than five minutes. This means that 21 percent of paper purchased by companies is wasted. In addition to this, the visible cost of printing, or hardware, only accounts for 27 percent of the total cost, highlighting the woeful under-management of this area.”

According to Gartner, document management processing expenses can be harnessed through the adoption of strategic technology offerings like Managed Print Services (MPS) and fleet document management systems. The research company also states that – although most organisations could, in principle, manage office print actively and effectively, in reality many lack the time, the staff, the experience, the tools, and the focus, and simply will not do it on their own.”

According to Johnstone, the simple fact is that, in today’s times, organisations are being forced to focus on their core business. “Companies are often unaware of how many printers they have or what they are paying for related support and consumable costs. In the corporate sector it is the rule, rather than the exception that companies fail to take advantage of economies of scale or a single support structure.

“By partnering with an expert within the MPS space, companies are better equipped to cast a critical eye on their print and imaging environments, enabling them to ascertain current paper, toner, maintenance, depreciation, insurance, rental and settlement costs and optimise the solutions utilised in order to reduce company costs and improve user productivity.”

These benefits are realised as users are in close proximity (within 12 metres) of a printer/copier/scanner and fax machine and have access to the latest speed and functionality. Security is tightened as confidential printing becomes a reality with password protection. Through an MPS partner, businesses can also reply on the proactive management of toner stock and reliable print services governed by a Service Level Agreement (SLA) outlining service delivery. In addition, monthly usage reports will allow a company to keep a tighter handle on usage and costs.

“A well-organised internal document output capability is of key importance to the successful operation of any business and forms an important aspect of its communications,” says Johnstone. “It is of the utmost importance that local companies realise the positive impact that can be made through this type of management service.”

http://www.printaudit.com

Ricoh Americas Corporation Launches Business Process Automation Group

Ricoh Americas Corporation, a leading provider of digital office equipment, announced the creation of a Business Process Automation (BPA) Group. Aligning under Ricoh\'s Document Solutions and Services Division (DSSD), BPA combines consulting services and technical resources with an experienced sales force to help current and prospective customers analyze their document management operations. In addition, BPA helps customers implement appropriate solutions to meet compliance and safety regulations, and improve overall efficiency and profitability.

To evaluate customers\' manual business processes in key practice areas including mailroom, finance, records management and order processing, Ricoh employs a Targeted Practice Approach (TPA). This approach enables Ricoh to assess its customers\' unique needs, and address key business challenges including complexity reduction, process innovation and strategic cost reduction. Ricoh subject-matter experts are brought onsite to review and provide customized recommendations of process improvements that will enable business growth and create a sustainable competitive advantage. Based on these recommendations, Ricoh\'s BPA Enterprise Solutions Consultants will assist the company in turning its current processes into turnkey solutions to fit their workflow requirements rather than merely providing tools that will work with their current processes.

"BPA is a true value-add for Ricoh customers because we\'re able to offer a suite of services from consultation to sales to implementation under one roof," said Mark Miller, senior vice president and deputy general manager, Document Solutions and Services, Ricoh Americas Corporation. "Ricoh\'s comprehensive approach eliminates the need for separate vendors to handle different aspects of the procedure, which can be costly and cause delays. Furthermore, customers benefit from access to our experts who can design workflows that increase efficiency, reduce waste and energy consumption and improve environmental sustainability to save firms time, money and resources."

For more information about BPA, please visit http://www.ricoh-bpa.com.

About Ricoh Americas Corporation
Ricoh Americas Corporation, headquartered in West Caldwell, N.J., is a subsidiary of Ricoh Company Ltd., the 73-year-old leading supplier of office automation equipment and electronics, with fiscal year 2008 sales in excess of $20 billion. Ricoh Americas Corporation is a leading provider of document solutions. For more information, visit http://www.ricoh-usa.com.

On Friday, Xerox CEO Ursula Burns will host a reunion of retirees who were involved with the development of the Xerox 914 , which made photocopying cheap, easy and ubiquitous.

The copier also helped make what is now known as Xerox Corp

. — a Connecticut-based Fortune 500 firm that employs close to 7,000 in the Rochester area and 54,000 worldwide.

The reunion will be held at the company’s Webster campus. The Rochester-based Haloid Xerox unveiled the product at a New York City trade show on Sept. 16, 1959. And the company began turning out the 600-pound pieces of equipment from a factory on Orchard Street on city\'s northwest side, with the first reaching customers in early 1960.

Coca-Cola bottler: Peninsula Beverages partners with Itec

Itec Cape Town North will be the primary supplier and service provider for the bottling company.

Independent bottling company Peninsula Beverages Company has chosen Itec Cape Town North as its primary supplier and service provider for its document management environment.

Peninsula Beverages holds the rights to manufacture and distribute the products of The Coca-Cola Company within the Western Cape and Northern Cape territories. Based in Parow, the company employs more than 1 300 people.

Under terms of the contract, Itec Cape Town North is responsible for managing multifunctional products (MFPs) and other office automation equipment at Peninsula Beverages, which operations extend from Springbok in the Northern Cape through to Worcester, Hermanus and Ashton in the Western Cape. Itec, southern Africa\'s fastest growing office automation and telecommunications company, is responsible for supporting most of these sites.

Says Bruce Carter, chief information officer at Peninsula Beverages: “Most MFP vendors have similar product offerings, so I was really looking for a partner that could address my business needs and offer me a high level of service. Right from the start, I was impressed by the professionalism of the Itec team and felt that Itec Cape Town North would be the right fit for our business.”

Malcolm Pearce, operations director at Itec Cape Town North, says choosing the right partner to manage the document output environment is critical for companies that are looking to improve efficiencies and save costs in a tight economic climate.

According to Gartner, companies can save up to 30% on running costs by selecting the right managed print services partner, because it gets their document output under control. Yet many companies fail to pay as much attention to potential cost-savings opportunities in the document environment as they do to managing the costs of telecoms, network and PC infrastructure.

For enterprises such as Peninsula Beverages, downtime in the document output environment can be costly, because time is wasted while employees are unable to effectively print, scan and handle documents, Pearce adds. It makes sense to outsource this task to a specialist firm like Itec so that in-house IT resources can focus on strategic matters rather than on break-fix tasks.

“We are able to supply and support a range of best-of-breed printers, faxes and multifunctional products from the world\'s leading office automation vendors,” says Pearce.

“But we really set ourselves apart from the rest of the market by taking a holistic, solutions-led approach to each organisation\'s unique office document management needs. We understand the importance of customer service given the mission-critical role office automation plays in the average enterprise\'s business.”

GAM Printers Inc. Takes Delivery of a RICOH Pro C900 Digital Color Printer From IKON (Business Wire via Yahoo! Finance)

Canon deal may up ante for Xerox

Japanese electronics giant Canon Inc. announced Monday it will purchase Dutch production printing company Oce NV for $1.1 billion.

Each company goes head to head with Xerox in a particular segment of the printing industry, with Canon being a major player in office equipment and Oce specializing in particularly high-end production equipment.

Oce and Eastman Kodak Co. have a joint marketing agreement under which the Dutch company sells Kodak-made NexPress digital presses in some European markets.

A Canon-Oce merger “certainly gives Xerox a more formidable competition … if they can pull it together,” said Andy Slawetsky, president of Industry Analysts Inc., a Rochester-based imaging industry market research firm. “The potential is there for them to really be a force against Xerox.”

Canon already was becoming a greater force for Xerox to reckon with as it announced in September that it and Hewlett-Packard Co. would jointly market a number of multifunction office products.

“Through the merger of Canon and Oce, we believe that we will be able to realize clear benefits … in terms of product mix and marketing, and are confident that this winning combination will contribute greatly to our goal of becoming the overall No. 1 presence in the printing industry,” Canon President Tsuneji Uchida said in a statement.

Under the deal, Oce would be a division of Canon. The cash transaction is expected to close in early 2010.

Oce barely eked out a profit in the first six months of 2009, with its net income down 96 percent — woes that it chalked up to the overall economy.

Slawetsky said it was no surprise that a struggling Oce was snapped up by another graphic arts company and that Xerox itself might have considered the acquisition in recent months.

Between the HP deal and the Oce purchase, which includes the company’s well-regarded sales force, Canon would end up with arguably a broader set of products at different price points than Xerox, which employs about 6,900 in the Rochester area, Slawetsky said.

However, said Xerox’s Regina Testa, the company “is entrenched as the leader in the graphic communications space, and this agreement won’t impact that position.”

“Xerox has a total value proposition that is unmatched by our competition — including a mix of technology, workflow and business development,” said Testa, vice president of graphic communications for the company’s Global Business group.

Meanwhile, Testa said the Oce-Canon sales force “is fragmented and lacks the in-depth understanding of the companies’ disjointed product lines.”

Caringo Inks Global Distribution Agreement with Xerox DocuShare

CAStor will deliver affordable, policy-based content storage

AUSTIN, Texas, Nov. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Caringo, Inc., the leading provider of content storage software enabling clustered storage infrastructure for active and archive content, today announced the completion of a worldwide distribution agreement with Xerox Corporation. Under the terms of the agreement Caringo software will be available for distribution with Xerox\'s DocuShare Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform to deliver a content storage system that helps clients manage large quantities of archived documents at an affordable price. When integrated with DocuShare, Caringo\'s product, CAStor, will allow archived content across a variety of storage systems to be unified in one storage pool, giving customers improved access and more efficient use of storage resources.

DocuShare delivers leading paper-to-digital and ECM solutions enabling organizations to effectively manage information. CAStor will provide DocuShare users with a back-end file storage system that is simple to deploy, scales to accommodate large volumes, and enables storage-level policy capabilities for retention, long-term preservation and regulatory compliance. The cluster architecture of CAStor allows the content stored to scale seamlessly as a single, virtualized pool of storage and without interruption to DocuShare operations or content availability. The combined solution will give CAStor and DocuShare customers a complete solution to capture information assets, manage business processes and ensure protection according to policy.

"Customers tell us that storage growth and management of business records are major challenges due to the massive volume of digital content. Cost-effective and seamless storage management is becoming a requirement in ECM," said Mark Goros, Chief Executive Officer at Caringo. "Xerox DocuShare is the perfect complement to CAStor and will allow customers to implement a solution to effectively manage and preserve content to meet their archival and compliance requirements today and into the future."

Xerox DocuShare is an enterprise content management platform developed by Xerox Corporation. DocuShare\'s capabilities range from basic content services to more robust business process automation and paper-to-digital solutions. Xerox DocuShare also offers a number of partner solutions for vertical and cross industry business processes. For more information, visit http://www.docushare.com or call 1-800-735-7749.

Caringo, Inc. is an innovative software provider focused on delivering the most advanced technology for accessing, storing and distributing content. Its flagship product, CAStor, dramatically improves the scope and economics of content storage enabling customers to implement clustered storage without being locked into proprietary hardware. Founded on the operating principle that things should be made as simple as possible and a customer-first focus, Caringo makes content storage affordable, scalable, fast and easy. More information can be found at http://www.caringo.com.

Caringo and CAStor are trademarks of Caringo, Inc. Other companies and products mentioned herein may be trademarks or trade names of their respective owners.

November 16, 2009 – Boca Raton, FL – Poetry fans, community leaders and executives from Océ North America’s Production Printing Division gathered on November 12 at Océ’s new state-of-the-art Customer Experience Center in Boca Raton to celebrate the introduction of local poet Dwight Stewart’s new book and his unique tie to this international leader in digital document systems.

Although Stewart was a guest lecturer at this year’s Océ Future Authors Project Summer Writing Workshop, an annual program for Palm Beach County, Florida middle and high school students that allows students to experience becoming published authors, he was surprised to learn that his new book was digitally printed at Morris Publishing, an Océ North America customer located in Kearney, Nebraska, using Océ digital book production technology.

“What a pleasant surprise it was to learn that my book, although printed far away in Nebraska, came to life thanks to the innovations of a company right here in Palm Beach County,” said Stewart. “Thanks to the technology provided by Océ North America, authors like me are empowered to realize the dream of being published and are enabled to share their legacies.”

When this unique local tie was uncovered, Océ executives offered to host a book signing and reception for the poet, who began writing poetry at age seven. Also a songwriter, lyricist and scholar, Stewart, an Okeeheelee Middle School teacher holds bachelor\'s degrees in philosophy and government from Wesleyan University; and master\'s in teaching history from the University of Vermont.

“We were thrilled to have Dwight involved in our Future Authors Project program, but when we discovered his new book was actually printed at one of our publishing customers on one of our digital book printing systems, the coincidence was uncanny,” said Sheryl Pattek, Vice President of Marketing Services for the Océ North America Production Printing Systems division. “This experience exemplifies just how impactful digital printing technology has become.

“It’s a privilege to be able to help him unveil his beautiful new book of poetry. He inspired our young Future Authors this summer and is now demonstrating to all of us how the dreams of all authors can come true.”

Started in 2005, this public/private partnership between the School District of Palm Beach County and Boca Raton-based Océ North America Production Printing Systems division is designed to help students pursue their dreams to become published authors. During a free eight-day summer workshop, middle and high school students become published authors, learn how to improve their writing skills, gain hands-on understanding of how authors are published, and learn about today’s digital print and publishing opportunities.

Students gain insight through interactions with Océ executives, as well as with well-known published authors. The day-long sessions are taught by certified Palm Beach County teachers, who conduct daily writing exercises, coaching sessions and writing practice. Works from each student are then compiled and digitally printed in final book form by Océ.

Océ is a leading international provider of digital document management technology and services. The company’s solutions are based on Océ’s advanced software applications that deliver documents and data over internal networks and the Internet to printing devices and archives -- locally and around the world. Supporting the workflow solutions are Océ digital printers and scanners, considered the most reliable and productive in the world. Océ also offers a wide range of display graphics, consulting and outsourcing solutions.

Océ employs around 22,000 people, with 2008 revenues of approximately $4.3 billion, operates in around 100 countries and maintains research and manufacturing centers in the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, Germany, France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Romania and Singapore. Océ North America is headquartered in Trumbull, CT, with additional business units in Chicago, IL; New York City; Boca Raton, FL; Salt Lake City, UT and Vancouver, BC. North American revenues represented approximately half of Océ’s worldwide business in 2008, and employment is approximately 10,000. For more information about Océ, visit http://www.oceusa.com. Outside the U.S., consult http://global.oce.com.

“Océ” and the Océ logo are registered trademarks of Océ-Technologies B.V. All products and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks and are the property of their owners and are respectfully acknowledged.