Some Dealer-Channel Digital Imaging Vendors Are Finally Coming Around To B2B—Who Is And Who Isn’t?
Vendor B2B Offerings And Strategy
| Vendor | Ink Jet | B/W | Color | Business Feature Set |
Enterprise Feature Set | Comments |
| Canon | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Intriguing products with moderate-to-high CPP and TCO, but Canon U.S.A.’s heart really isn’t into B2B with second-rate product information on its Web site (note, there has been a recent improvement). |
| Konica Minolta | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Low CPP and TCO. Could use revamped color MFPs. |
| Kyocera Mita | No | No | No | — | — | Has no products available via the B2B/retail channel. |
| Océ | No | No | No | — | — | Has no pretensions. Océ has always been a production-printing oriented company and always will be. |
| OKI | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | — | Has several attractive offerings, albeit most with comparatively high CPP and TCO. |
| Panasonic | No | Yes | No | Yes | No | Attractive B/W offerings with moderate CPP/TCO. Needs color products. |
| Ricoh | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | The sleeper in this group, Ricoh has quietly developed a strong lineup of “SP” Aficio B2B products. GelSprinter ink-jet printers/MFPs are strong performers but CPP and TCO can be comparatively high. |
| Sharp | No | Yes | No | — | — | Sharp has a three flavors of a single B/W monochrome laser MPF engine available and needs to make a decision on whether they want to pursue the B2B channel in force. |
| Toshiba | No | No | No | — | — | Toshiba does not sell any B2B products but has a program for its dealers that enables them to service and sell supplies for HP B2B devices. |
| Xerox | No (does market solid-ink devices though) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Xerox has a strong lineup of B2B laser printers and MFPs with low CPP and TCO ,but Phaser solid- ink printers have comparatively higher acquisition prices compared to competitive ink-jet systems. An interesting side note is that just this week, Xerox removed the “Small Office” section from their Web site and now only features “Office” and “Production” sections. |
In summary, it’s clear to us that some vendors “get it” that the B2B/SMB marketplace is lucrative and some do not. It’s also clear that some are dedicated to their dealers to the point of no return. How much longer do they think that offices will be willing to spend two- to three-times as much for a dealer-channel A3 product, whether they need A3 output or not?
Many office dealers also seem to be firmly convinced that they need to only sell devices that require periodic maintenance and service contracts. Why can’t they simply be content to sell relatively maintenance-free B2B products and sit back and profit from supply sales? And yes, these devices will eventually break and require service.
The answer to this is that dealers have invested in a huge service infrastructure that is profitable and costly to maintain and hence are unwilling to see the forest through the trees. Meanwhile, page volume and supply sales are being continually eroded away by competitors who offer the best lineup of B2B (A4) products.
Just had a little coapmny bring in a new Sharp MX-3110N. Within 2 hours of initial setup at the office, a fuser roller’s sleeve self-destructed. That was *after* the Sharp-prescribed method of adding the MX-3110N via Apple’s Mac OS 10.6.x Snow Leopard System Preferences Printing IPP proved to *not* work. On a hunch, the LPD method of installation did work; and Bonjour also worked; so eventually printing in color and on both sides REAL DUPLEX was achieved! Yet, the more frustrating feature, or not a feature(?), is the failure of the Address Book in the LCD display when you select it, you *do not* see a list of the contacts / entries that you have entered by way of using an Internet browser connected over your office LAN to the MX-3110N. That’s correct; the entries show in the Internet browser, but not in the Sharp’s LCD display go figure. It’s June 2011, and we are hoping that some firmware update will resolve that, sometime this summer.
Thanks for the report! The address book feature is dessigned to work with network address books only. Most netork printers do not play nice with Web mail and you have to build an address book manually on the device either from the control panel or embedded web server.